Obama's Second Term Could Be The Most Consequential In Recent Memory

Barack Obama enters the final year of his presidency with plenty of unfinished business, from closing Guantanamo Bay to completing negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

But Obama has already accomplished a great deal in his second term -- more than many of his critics concede and perhaps as much as any president in modern history.

In fact, the question today is not whether Obama has made real progress since 2012. The question is how much of that progress will last beyond 2017, when somebody else is in the White House.

While that’s a pretty big unknown, it wasn’t long ago that many smart observers doubted Obama would have much of a legacy to protect in the first place. His second-term efforts to get gun control legislation and then bipartisan immigration reform through Congress had failed. His bid to get congressional approval of fast-track trade authority, so that he could negotiate agreements on his own, seemed likely to meet a similar fate.

Worse still, the administration was under siege -- in Congress, in the courts, and in the media. Controversy over the killing of American personnel in Benghazi and IRS treatment of nonprofit organizations was creating the kind of turmoil that has plagued every second-term presidency since Richard Nixon’s. The fate of Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement, the Affordable Care Act, was also in doubt, thanks to a lawsuit threatening to blow away private insurance reforms in two-thirds of the states.

In short, the president looked like the quintessential lame duck.

But a lot has changed since then. Stymied in Congress, Obama has used executive authority to achieve partial versions of what he’d hoped to achieve through legislation.

He implemented far-reaching limits on greenhouse gases from power plants. He expanded dramatically the number of immigrants who can work here without threat of deportation, although the Supreme Court still has to review that action. And sometime soon -- maybe even this coming week -- Obama is likely to issue executive orders that would force more gun sellers to use background checks, in an effort to close or at least shrink what’s become known as the “gun show loophole.”

More at the link about one of our best presidents.

Walt