Obama's Legacy Intact?

The media and the Democrats’ hostility towards President Trump stems from the fact that they see him as a threat to the legacy of their favorite President, Barack Obama; who had done more to advance the causes of progressivism than any President in more than a generation.  That explains why 100 percent of the Democrats in both houses of Congress voted against the attempts to repeal and replace Obamacare because that would amount to admitting that the healthcare law championed by the man they worship did not work.  But Obama loyalists fail to realize that much of his legacy still remains intact.   

 

As with every President, President Obama has left his biggest legacy in the judiciary.  He appointed two justices to the Supreme Court and appointed several other judges to the lower courts.  The Supreme Court made some major decisions, such as declaring gay marriage a “Constitutional right”, during the Obama era which could have gone the other way had a Republican won the White House in 2008.  Obama’s appointments to the lower courts have done everything they can to block the Trump agenda, especially Judge William Orrick, who prevented the Trump Administration from withholding funds from sanctuary cities that choose to ignore Federal immigration law in favor of the doctrines of political correctness and multiculturalism.  Orrick also prosecuted the Center for Medical Progress, the pro-life group whose undercover video recordings showed Planned Parenthood officials discussing the sale of fetal tissue.  For its part, the DOJ has opened an investigation into Planned Parenthood. 

 

We can also thank our 44^th President for much of the division between left and right that plagues our country.  Liberals can talk about the divisiveness of President Trump all they want but let’s not forget about the comments President Obama made ahead of the 2008 Presidential Primary in Pennsylvania.  President Obama showed his contempt for traditional Americans when he said “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”  Not surprisingly, Pennsylvania Democrats voted in favor of Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Presidential Primary.  At the 2015 Easter Prayer Breakfast, President Obama appeared to take a veiled swipe at Christians who hold traditional beliefs, saying “I have to say that sometimes when I listen to less-than-loving expressions by Christians, I get concerned.”  Earlier that year, during a speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, the Former President told Christians to “get off their high horse” when it came to criticizing radical Islamic terrorism.  President Trump presented himself as the voice of all the forgotten men and women, whom President Obama’s chosen successor Hillary Clinton referred to as a “basket of deplorables.”  Needless to say, the Obama Coalition did not like it that much when the pendulum swung in the other direction.

 

President Obama had an opportunity to unite the country during his Presidency and he definitely blew it.  Rather than follow the MLK playbook, he chose instead to follow the Al Sharpton playbook.  Race relations reached an all-time low during the Obama Presidency, according to a poll from Rasmussen Reports.  That poll found that sixty percent of Americans believed that race relations got worse under the country’s first black President while only nine percent felt that they had improved.  Even a majority of the racial minorities polled by Rasmussen agreed that race relations worsened during the age of Obama.           

 

President Obama’s legacy also includes adding nearly $10 trillion to the debt, although, in fairness, neither party has done a good job of keeping our debt under control.  Sean Hannity has talked about the travails of the Obama economy extensively on his show; the list he repeatedly put up on the screen did not include the fact that the economy never reached 3 percent growth for a full year during his tenure in office.    

 

Nearly a year after his departure from office, America still deals with the consequences of Obama’s foreign policy blunders.  His premature withdrawal from Iraq led to a vacuum that the terrorist group ISIS, whom he foolishly referred to as “jayvee”, was more than happy to fill.  The Obama Administration’s decision to depose Libyan dictator Moammar Qhadafi only further destabilized that country while his failure to act on the “red line” in Syria led to a massive refugee crisis.          

 

Several Obama-era holdovers still operate within the “Deep State” and many of them have spent the first year of the Trump Presidency working to undermine him by leaking classified information to the press.  The American people now have another reason to doubt the legitimacy of the Russia probe after Fox News’s James Rosen reported that the wife of Bruce Ohr, an Obama DOJ holdover who served as associate deputy attorney general until last week, had ties to Fusion GPS; the firm that produced the dossier filled with salacious accusations against President Trump.  Ohr faced a demotion last week upon revelations that he met with Fusion GPS in the weeks following the 2016 Presidential Election.  The integrity of the Russia probe has suffered a little bit after Judicial Watch obtained an e-mail Andrew Weissman, one of the senior investigators in the case, sent to Sally Yates, another Obama DOJ Holdover who served as Acting Attorney General for the first ten days of the Trump Administration.  In the e-mail, he praised her for choosing not to defend the President’s travel ban in court, a decision which led to her firing.  The news about Weissman came to light after the public became aware of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s removal of Peter Stzrok from the team of FBI agents working on the Russia investigation after he learned of Anti-Trump text messages he sent to his mistress.

 

There is one part of President Obama’s legacy that Republicans should want to remain intact.  During the reign of Obama, the Democrats lost more than 1,000 state legislative seats, 12 US Senate seats, a dozen governorships and more than five dozen seats in the US House of Representatives.  Republicans should do everything that they can to make sure that this part of the Obama legacy remains intact.

 

Strangely, Republicans seem more interested in preserving another part of the Obama legacy, one that will ensure their electoral demise.  Months before the 2012 Presidential Election, President Obama signed the executive order known as DACA, which shielded around 800,000 illegal immigrants brought to the country as children from deportation.  President Obama signed this executive order after repeatedly telling immigration activists he did not have the authority to do so.  Three months ago, President Trump announced his intention to rescind the decision, giving Congress six months to figure out if they want to enact into law or not.  34 House Republicans have penned a letter to Paul Ryan asking for a “DACA fix.”  If only more Republicans had the same sense of urgency for building the wall.  The Democrats have accused Republicans of playing politics with these children’s lives but politics was the whole rationale behind DACA in the first place.   As Ann Coulter pointed out, “The Democratic Party is in the fight of its life against a conservative demographic tsunami.  Its only hope is to make the poorest half of Mexico voting citizens.”  The Democrats could care less about the economic implications of DACA, they care much more about the political implications.

 

President Obama’s legacy could evaporate further if the Trump Administration works to drain the swamp and eliminate as many Obama holdovers as possible.  While President Trump has already worked via executive order to undo some of the burdensome regulations imposed during the Obama era, much of the further rollbacks of the Obama legacy will require Congressional action.  Should the Republican-led Congress pass an amnesty bill or fail to enact a conservative agenda, another far-left President will soon win the White House, leaving behind an even more damaging legacy that any future Republican President will find much harder to undo.