New York Times (Editorial)
April 11, 2015
It
is a peculiar, but unmistakable, phenomenon: As Barack Obama’s
presidency heads into its twilight, the rage of the Republican
establishment toward him is growing louder,
angrier and more destructive.
Republican
lawmakers in Washington and around the country have been focused on
blocking Mr. Obama’s agenda and denigrating him personally since the day
he took office
in 2009. But even against that backdrop, and even by the dismal
standards of political discourse today, the tone of the current attacks
is disturbing. So is their evident intent — to undermine not just Mr.
Obama’s policies, but his very legitimacy as president.
It
is a line of attack that echoes Republicans’ earlier questioning of Mr.
Obama’s American citizenship. Those attacks were blatantly racist in
their message — reminding
people that Mr. Obama was black, suggesting he was African, and
planting the equally false idea that he was secretly Muslim. The current
offensive is slightly more subtle, but it is impossible to dismiss the
notion that race plays a role in it.
Perhaps
the most outrageous example of the attack on the president’s legitimacy
was a letter signed by 47 Republican senators to the leadership of Iran
saying Mr. Obama
had no authority to conclude negotiations over Iran’s nuclear weapons
program. Try to imagine the outrage from Republicans if a similar group
of Democrats had written to the Kremlin in 1986 telling Mikhail
Gorbachev that President Ronald Reagan did not have
the authority to negotiate a nuclear arms deal at the Reykjavik summit
meeting that winter.
There
is no functional difference between that example and the Iran talks,
except that the congressional Republican caucus does not like Mr. Obama
and wants to deny him
any policy victory.
On
April 3, Colbert King, a Washington Post columnist summarized a series
of actions by Republicans attacking the president’s authority in areas
that most Americans thought
had been settled by the Civil War. Arizona legislators, for example,
have been working on a bill that “prohibits this state or any of its
political subdivisions from using any personnel or financial resources
to enforce, administer or cooperate with an executive
order issued by the president of the United States that has not been
affirmed by a vote of Congress and signed into law as prescribed by the
United States Constitution.”
The
bill sounds an awful lot like John C. Calhoun’s secessionist screed of
1828, the South Carolina Exposition and Protest. Laurie Roberts of The
Arizona Republic wrote
that it was just “one of a series of kooky measures aimed at declaring
our independence from federal gun laws, from the Affordable Care Act,
from the Environmental Protection Agency, from the Department of
Justice, from Barack Obama.”
Republicans
defend this sort of action by accusing Mr. Obama of acting like a king
and citing executive actions he has taken — on immigration and pollution
among other
things. That’s nonsense. The same Republicans had no objection when
President George W. Bush used his executive authority to authorize the
torture of terrorism suspects and tap the phones of American citizens.
It is not executive orders the Republicans object
to; it is Mr. Obama’s policies, and Mr. Obama.
The
Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, who declared war on the new
president in 2009 as minority leader and used the filibuster to paralyze
the Senate, essentially
told foreign governments to ignore the carbon-emission goals Mr. Obama
was trying to set by international agreement. Because climate-change
deniers in Congress and in some states oppose the effort, setting those
goals is pointless, Mr. McConnell pronounced
last month.
If
this insurrection is driven by something other than a blend of
ideological extremism and personal animosity, it is not clear what that
might be. But it is ugly, it
deepens mistrust of government and it harms the office of the
president, not just Mr. Obama.
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