The Ferguson police shooting, the death of Freddie Gray, and the Charleston church shooting

In the summer of 2014, accounts of unarmed African Americans who had died in the process of arrest by police began to fill the media. In July 2014 a man in New York City died as a result of a choke hold applied an by arresting officer. In August protest demonstrations escalated into civil violence in Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, after a policeman shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager, during Brown’s arrest. Protests against those actions and against court decisions not to indict the involved officers continued into 2015, and in April of that year rioting erupted in Baltimore, Maryland, on the day of the funeral of Freddie Gray, a Black man who died a week after incurring a severe spinal-cord injury while in police custody. Then, in June, the country was shocked when nine African Americans were shot and killed, allegedly by a young white man in a hate crime, in a historic Black church in Charleston, South Carolina. The apparently white supremacist motivations of the accused killer sparked a discussion of the display of the Confederate flag on the grounds of the capitol of South Carolina and its perception by many as a symbol of oppression and racial subjugation. In July the South Carolina government legislated the flag’s removal.

Same-sex marriage and Obamacare Supreme Court rulings and final agreement on the Iran nuclear deal

At the end of June the Supreme Court ruled on a pair of landmark cases. In Obergefell v. Hodges, it found state bans on same-sex marriage and on recognizing same-sex marriages performed in other jurisdictions to be unconstitutional under the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. That ruling thereby legalized the practice of same-sex marriage throughout the country.

In King v. Burwell, the court upheld the portion of Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that allowed the government to provide subsidies to poor and middle-class citizens in order to help them purchase health care, thus further solidifying the legality of Obamacare.

On July 14, after some two years of continuing negotiations, the P5+1 and Iran reached a final agreement on limits on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for the reduction of sanctions against the country. The terms of the final agreement largely followed a framework agreement that had been accepted by both sides in April. Over a 10-year period, Iran would greatly reduce its nuclear stockpile and give inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency access to its nuclear facilities in exchange for the gradual removal of sanctions. By September the deal had won enough support in the Senate to ensure that a potential congressional resolution disapproving the deal would not have enough votes to overcome a presidential veto.

New climate regulations, the Keystone XL pipeline, and intervention in the Syrian Civil War

In July 2015 the U.S. and Cuba officially reopened embassies in each other’s capital. In August Obama used executive authority to announce new climate regulations requiring U.S. power plants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 32 percent below 2005 levels by the year 2030; however, even before the regulation had been reviewed by a federal appeals court, a lawsuit brought against the action was granted a stay request by the Supreme Court that was to remain in place as the lawsuit made its way through the courts. Environmentalists gained a more permanent victory in November when Obama rejected the proposal to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast. Opponents of the project had argued that extracting the petroleum from tar sands in Alberta would contribute significantly to global warming.

Having admitted in June 2015 that his administration lacked a “complete strategy” to confront ISIL, Obama authorized the deployment of several dozen special-operations troops in Syria in October 2015. That action—which occurred at the same time as growing direct involvement by Russia in the Syrian Civil War—was presented as one component of an evolving strategy that eventually led to talks aimed at effecting a political transition in Syria. In March 2016 Secretary of State Kerry accused ISIL of carrying out a genocide against religious and ethnic minorities in the areas of Syria and Iraq that it controlled and called for an international investigation into atrocities committed by ISIL and punishment for those found to be responsible.

The Merrick Garland nomination and Supreme Court rulings on public unions, affirmative action, and abortion

Also in March 2016, Obama nominated judicial moderate Merrick Garland to take the seat on the Supreme Court vacated by the death of staunch conservative Antonin Scalia. However, Senate Republicans had already vowed not to hold confirmation hearings for any new justice until after the 2016 presidential election. As a result, a trio of important rulings were decided without a full bench. On March 29, in its ruling on the most important labour-law case brought before it in decades, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, the court reached a 4–4 tie that preserved the right of public unions to charge agency fees (charges to nonmembers to cover the cost of collective bargaining and other nonpolitical union activities from which nonmembers benefit). Ruling on Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin on June 23, the court voted 4–3 (with one justice recused) to affirm an appellate court decision that had endorsed the race-conscious admissions policy of the university as consistent with the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. The decision represented an important victory for advocates of affirmative action. Finally, on June 27, 2016, by a 5–3 vote in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the court invalidated two provisions of a 2013 Texas law that had imposed strict requirements on abortion clinics in the state, purportedly in the interest of protecting women’s health. The court ruled that the two provisions placed an “impermissible obstacle” to women seeking an abortion in Texas, in violation of the court’s decision in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992), which had prohibited “substantial obstacle[s] in the path of a woman seeking an abortion before the fetus attains viability,” including “[u]nnecessary health regulations,” as an “undue burden” on the right to abortion.

The Orlando nightclub shooting, the shooting of Dallas police officers, and the shootings in Baton Rouge

Meanwhile, the epidemic of gun violence in the United States persisted. Mass shootings at a community college in Oregon in October 2015 and a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado in November were followed by another in early December at a social services centre in San Bernardino, California, in which a husband and wife with militant Islamist sympathies killed 14 people and injured 22. On June 12, 2016, one of the deadliest mass shootings in modern U.S. history occurred at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, that was a centre for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) social life. Forty-nine people were killed and 50 others wounded in the attack by a lone gunman.

In July more police shootings and the shooting of police officers took the Orlando event’s place in the headlines. On the evening of July 7, a sniper shot and killed four police officers and a rapid transit officer and wounded several others in downtown Dallas at the close of a peaceful protest against the shootings earlier in the week of African American men by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and suburban Saint Paul, Minnesota. Before being killed by a robot-detonated explosive, the shooter told negotiators that he was upset by recent police shootings. Later in July three law-enforcement officers were shot and killed and three more wounded in Baton Rouge in another retaliatory incident.