Expdonaloaded News; The Obama legacy

With the Afford­able Care Act (Obamacare) now safe for posterity, thanks to last week’s US Su­preme Court judgment, Presi­dent Barack Obama can now breathe easy, relax and enjoy being President of the United States. He has been put through the wringer by the sheer enormity of the problems he met on his desk. He was made to go through hell and high water by sworn foes; but now that his epochal legislation, the earth-shaking change in health­care in the United States, can no longer be threatened by Republican misanthropes, Mr. Obama should try to enjoy his exalted office for once.
Pity he has just about 18 months to do so, which is just about a quarter of his tenure. He should feel fulfilled. It is not just that many presidents tried to do what he did but failed, it is that he did it in spite of dreadful odds, all manners of traps, numerous machinations from different interest groups from the American Medical Association through the greedy Pharmaceutical organizations, the medical equipment manu­facturers which presented a spe­cial problem of their own, the huge evangelical organizations and later, even the Catholic Bishops and the Catholic laity (only the nuns, conscientious and god-fearing, were on his side). And the grand father of all these vested interests were the health insurance companies which shamelessly spent more than $250 million in the first few months of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), just trashing the legislation and fuelling the insanity of the Tea Party conserva­tive fanatics. Barack Obama must be one of the strongest men alive. True, his sudden grey hairs won’t‘re-grow’ black. His movie star physique and image, the ‘celeb­rity’ look is gone, too. He appears worn out and washed up. These are the tell-tale signs of what he’s been through these six and half years in which he did not get a breathing space from Republicans and the racist blood hounds among them, including Mr. Donald Trump, who did not quite believe that a black man could be President of the Unit­ed States.post by expdonaloaded.blogspot.com.. When he defeated a US war hero, Donald Trump wanted to see his birth certificate. Trump led the fringe Birther group that did everything to delegitimize Presi­dent Obama. The latest polls place him second, just two points behind Governor Jeb Bush. But he is head and shoulders above the crowd in the Republican field of presidential aspirants. Republicans wanted to destroy Obamacare for one primary rea­son – to spite Barack Obama. They did not have anything in its place. It was not as if they did not realize that if 45 million Americans can­not see a doctor when they need to because they cannot afford to see a doctor, it is a terrible testimony against the richest country in the world. But anyone with a pass­ing interest in Republican politics knows that such facts mean almost nothing to Republicans. Obamacare is a cat with nine lives. On at least 51 occasions, the Republican controlled House of Representatives put it up for vote to repeal it. Somehow, the votes always fell short. To destroy it politically and administratively, every Republican-controlled state refused to create health exchanges as required by the Act forcing their citizens to use the federally estab­lished exchanges. Every Republi­can presidential candidate made a solemn campaign promise to repeal Obamacare. But Mitt Romney was defeated in the second Obama landslide. The irony of Gover­nor Romney promising to repeal Obamacare is the ultimate illus­tration of the hypocritical postur­ing of a politician without “core.” The blueprint for Obamacare was practically lifted from Governor Romney’s successful healthcare program as governor of Massachu­setts. Yet rather than claim credit for it, he ran away from it, disown­ing his own program for which he had received a lot of praise. Someone should ask President Obama if in his quiet moments he doesn’t now regret his “protest vote” against US Chief Justice John Roberts. It is one of the wonders of the survival of Obamacare that each time it faced imminent death under the anvils of the US Supreme Court, its one single savior was always the Chief Justice, an awe­some lawyer who, as candidate for confirmation in the US Senate as Chief Justice in 2005, Senator Barack Obama, as he then was, voted against. In 2012 Obamacare was on death throes at the Supreme Court over a Republican challenge to its consti­tutionality. Because of the 5-4 split of the US Supreme Court in favor of the Conservatives, which had yielded horrendous judgments like ‘Bush v Gore’ in 2000, and ‘Citi­zens United’ (these judgments are regarded by Democrats as the fruits of Conservative judicial activism), most Democrats had surrendered and assumed it was “finished.” But it was not. The Chief Justice mi­raculously joined the Liberals, not minding the Obama vote of 2005, and simply saved Barack Obama, not only saving his landmark re­form but his re-election as well, for had Obamacare unraveled, Obama would not have won re-election in 2012. Subsequent to the 2012 judg­ment, the Conservatives were literally mad with the Chief Jus­tice and torrents of abuse came in such a scale that John Roberts was rumored to have gone into hid­ing. There can hardly be a hiding place f or a U S C hief J ustice. I t soon transpired that Roberts had prudently taken a trip, to stay away from the melee while the atmo­sphere cooled a bit. Last week’s decision was easier for him because, for one, it was a 6-3 majority decision. Justice Ken­nedy had joined the Liberals but Roberts did not just vote, he wrote the lead judgment himself, thus unabashedly taking ownership of the decision. Which seems to have annoyed the Conservatives even more. The anxiety in their respons­es is obvious: are we losing Roberts to the Liberals? There is a little an­ecdote about how Justice Roberts after reading the judgment, had to listen stone-faced to the brutal dis­sent thundered by Justice Antonin Scalia leading Alito and, of course, Clarence Thomas, the black man. There is clearly a thicket of de­spair in the Right, which is a good sign that they are beginning to see the futility of the continuous at­tempt to destroy Obamacare. And they are holding Chief Justice Rob­erts responsible for their failure. In one such response last week by Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow in Consti­tutional Studies at the Cato Insti­tute (a Washington Conservative think tank), he argues that “for the second time in three years, Chief Justice John Roberts has saved President Barack Obama’s signa­ture legislation, his eponymous healthcare law that seems to enjoy more legitimacy at the Supreme Court than among the American people.” In a lengthy jeremiad in which he tried to describe Roberts’s back­ground and how the Chief Justice excelled in “legal craft” and has a “hyper-nuanced approach to re­solving cases,” in him (Roberts), Shapiro went on, there is a conver­gence of the “two unholy strains of judicial agency: liberal activism and conservative pacifism.”

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