The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting

Gun violence was once again at the centre of the national dialogue after 20 children and 6 adults were killed in a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut on December 14, 2012. (The shooter also killed himself and his mother that day.) Obama echoed the widespread public concern by asking Congress to enact new gun-control legislation that would mandate universal background checks for gun purchases, eliminate the sales of assault weapons and magazines containing more than 10 rounds of ammunition, provide for enhanced protection in schools, and put renewed focus on the treatment of mental illness. As Obama sought to marshal support for such legislation, the National Rifle Association and other gun-rights advocates actively campaigned against it. In April 2013 the Senate debated and then took preliminary votes on a gun-control bill and a series of amendments that by consent of both parties needed a filibuster-proof supermajority of 60 votes before the bill would be submitted for formal passage. Notwithstanding polls that indicated overwhelming public support for universal background checks, a measure that called for greatly expanded background checks failed to garner sufficient support (winning only a simple majority, 54–46). Although the vote generally followed party lines, a handful of Republicans supported the measure and a few Democrats opposed it. All the related amendments also failed, and the bill was withdrawn.

“Sequester” cuts, the Benghazi furor, and Susan Rice on the hot seat

The budget compromise reached in January delayed for two months the automatic cuts on military and social spending that had been mandated by Congress in July 2012 if Democrats and Republicans failed to agree on an alternative approach to deficit reduction. When the new March 31, 2013, deadline passed without an agreement, the initial round of these so-called “sequester” cuts went into effect. The first high-profile consequence of the cuts, significant delays in air travel resulting from mandatory furloughs for air-traffic controllers, was quickly addressed by Congress authorizing the Federal Aviation Administration to shift funds from facility improvement to salaries. As the spring progressed, however, officials of more and more federally funded programs and agencies bemoaned the reductions to the services they provided that resulted from the sequester cuts.

Obama’s efforts to move forward with his second-term agenda were compromised by a number of controversies in which the administration was embroiled. Republican criticism of the government’s role in the Benghazi attacks had been ongoing, but it escalated in May, when assertions of mismanagement and unpreparedness were compounded by renewed accusations of a cover-up, which many Republicans saw reflected in a recently released e-mail exchange between officials of the State Department and the CIA that had preceded UN Ambassador Susan Rice’s appearance on television news programs a few days after the attacks. Characterizing the e-mail string as a dialogue grounded not in politics but in an effort to convey the changing understanding of events that had occurred just a few days previously, the administration dismissed the Republican allegations as politically motivated.

The IRS scandal, the Justice Department’s AP phone records seizure, and Edward Snowden’s leaks

Also in May 2013, Obama joined Republicans in roundly castigating the Internal Revenue Service after revelations that employees of the department had excessively scrutinized conservative groups’ applications for tax-exempt status. Obama asked for and accepted the resignation of the department’s acting commissioner and promised to reform the department, but, unsatisfied, Republicans led further investigations into the matter.

That month Republicans as well as many Democrats also were outraged over revelations that the Department of Justice, as part of an investigation into a news leak related to a foiled terrorist plot, had subpoenaed and seized two months’ worth of phone records of reporters and editors who worked in several Associated Press offices in May 2012 without notifying that organization. Despite Attorney General Eric Holder’s explanation that the news leak was serious, Republicans characterized the action as an egregious violation of the First Amendment and again pursued further congressional inquiries.

The government’s accessing of phone records was again the issue when in June 2013 Edward Snowden, an American intelligence contractor, revealed through The Guardian newspaper that the National Security Agency had compelled telecommunications company Verizon to turn over metadata (such as numbers dialed and duration of calls) for millions of its subscribers. He also disclosed the existence of a broader data-mining program that gave the NSA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Government Communications Headquarters—Britain’s NSA equivalent—“direct access” to the servers of such Internet giants as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple. Snowden was charged with espionage by the U.S. and ultimately ended up in Russia, where he received temporary refugee status. In August, Bradley Manning, who had provided the Web site WikiLeaks with hundreds of thousands of classified documents in 2010, was convicted of espionage and theft, among other charges, and sentenced to 35 years in prison.

Removal of Mohammed Morsi, Obama’s “red line” in Syria, and chemical weapons

Developments in Egypt and Syria in 2013 continued to provide major challenges for U.S. foreign policy. When protests against the Egyptian military’s removal of Mohammed Morsi from the presidency in July led to the killing of hundreds of his supporters in July and August, some American politicians called for the suspension of U.S. financial aid to Egypt (more than $1 billion per year), citing U.S. law that required the federal government to terminate aid if power in the recipient country changed as a result of a coup. Attempting to maintain a neutral stance, the Obama administration hesitated to label Morsi’s removal a coup but called for a quick return to civilian leadership.

Seemingly reluctant to be drawn into military involvement in another conflict in the Middle East, the administration had also been cautious in its response to the Syrian Civil War. While it had begun providing food and financial aid to those who were opposing the regime of Syrian Pres. Bashar al-Assad in February 2013, the U.S. government did not provide military support to the opposition until June, largely in response to reports of the use of chemical weapons by Syrian government forces. Commenting on a possible U.S. response to events in Syria, Obama had said in May 2012, “We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is, we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.” In late August 2013, in response to reports that an alleged chemical attack by the Syrian government had killed hundreds of people in suburban Damascus on August 21, Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron, in a statement released by Cameron’s office, “reiterated that significant use of chemical weapons would merit a serious response from the international community”; both men tasked officials of their governments and military “to examine all the options.”

The decision not to respond militarily in Syria

However, despite British intelligence assessments that chemical weapons had been used in the incident on August 21 and that it was “highly likely” that the Assad regime had been responsible, on August 29 Parliament voted against endorsing Cameron’s call for military intervention in principle. The next day, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said that the United States had “high certainty” that chemical weapons had been used and that government forces had carried out the attack. After indicating that U.S. military response would be forthcoming, even without British involvement, Obama shifted gears on August 31 and asked for congressional authorization for military action while awaiting the findings of UN weapons inspectors who had returned from Damascus after examining the site of the attack. Released on September 16, their report indicated that there was “clear and convincing evidence” that the nerve agent sarin had been delivered by surface-to-surface rockets; however, it did not attempt to assess responsibility for the attack. Two days earlier the United States and Russia, a key supporter of the Assad regime, had brokered an agreement on a framework under which Syria would accede to the international Chemical Weapons Convention and submit to the controls of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, provide a comprehensive listing of its chemical weapons arsenal within a week, destroy all of its chemical mixing and filling equipment by November, and eliminate all of its chemical weapons by mid-2014.

The 2013 government shutdown

After an October 1 deadline passed with the House and Senate failing to agree on a continuing resolution bill for the federal budget, the federal government partially shut down for the first time in 17 years, furloughing several hundred thousand federal employees and closing numerous government offices as well as national parks and other public lands. For weeks, most congressional Republicans, led by those associated with the Tea Party movement, had sought to include in the continuing resolution a one-year delay in funding of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA; referred to by both parties as Obamacare), many of the provisions of which took effect on October 1. At the final hour the House Republican majority continued to refuse to rescind that requirement, while the Senate Democratic majority was steadfast in its rejection of it, forcing the government shutdown. On October 16—with political brinkmanship again having brought the government to the limit of the national debt ceiling and with the United States facing the possibility of a default that some feared might spark a global economic crisis—moderate Republicans voted with Democrats in both houses of Congress to pass a bill that fully reopened the government by funding it through January 15, 2014, extended national borrowing until February 7, and set up a committee tasked with arriving at longer-term budgetary solutions. The only change to Obamacare contained in the bill was a minor alteration to the procedures for verifying incomes for some people obtaining subsidized insurance.

The Obamacare rollout

The government shutdown temporarily diverted attention from an early October rollout of Obamacare that went badly awry. HealthCare.gov—the Web site that was established as a clearinghouse of information, a marketplace for insurance plans, and the place to apply for health coverage for those in 36 states—initially performed miserably. During its first weeks it operated slowly, erratically, or simply crashed, and far fewer users were able to access the site, much less apply for insurance, than had been hoped. In late October the Obama administration ordered a “tech surge” to address those problems, but progress in overcoming the glitches was slow, providing Republicans, who had borne the brunt of public dissatisfaction with the government shutdown, the opportunity to lambast the Web site in particular as well as Obamacare and the Obama administration in general. As HealthCare.gov’s performance improved, Obama went on the offensive, encouraging Americans to sign up for coverage and seeking to bolster his plummeting approval ratings. At the beginning of April 2014, after the end of the first open enrollment period, he would be able to announce that 7.1 million Americans had signed up for private insurance plans through the marketplace, meeting the administration’s target.

The Iran nuclear deal, the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013, and the Ukraine crisis

The world’s focus shifted in November 2013 to Geneva, where the United States, the other permanent members of the UN Security Council (Britain, France, China, and Russia), and Germany (collectively referred to as the P5+1) entered into an interim agreement with Iran that placed restrictions on Iran’s nuclear activities for six months in exchange for a temporary reduction in the sanctions that had been imposed upon Iran by the international community. Meanwhile, negotiators worked toward a comprehensive final agreement.

Before the end of 2013, the House (by a vote of 332–94) and the Senate (64–36) passed the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013, based on a compromise forged by Republican Rep. Paul Ryan and Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, the chairpersons of the House and Senate Budget Committees, respectively. The act replaced the bulk of the automatic spending cuts required by sequestration with targeted cuts, and it raised discretionary spending (split equally between military and nonmilitary funding). The resulting budget was intended to last through fiscal year 2014 and forestall another battle in January 2014, when the temporary budget agreement forged in October was due to expire (provided that the details of the budget could be worked out before then). A number of conservative congressional Republicans opposed the spending increases and called for the sequester-level cuts to remain in place, while many Democrats were disappointed because the act did not extend long-term unemployment benefits.

Among the foreign policy challenges faced by the United States in 2014 was how to respond to the upheaval in Ukraine that eventually resulted in the self-declared independence of the autonomous republic of Crimea, which was then annexed by Russia. The United States was one of many countries that condemned the involvement of Russia and Russian troops in the events in Crimea, and the United States also imposed sanctions on prominent individual Russians while joining the other members of the Group of Eight in suspending Russia from that organization.

The rise of ISIL (ISIS), the Bowe Bergdahl prisoner swap, and imposition of stricter carbon emission standards

In the summer of 2014, nearly three years after the last U.S. troops had left Iraq, events in that country prompted renewed U.S. intervention. The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL; also known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria [ISIS])—an entity formed by al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Syrian Nusrah Front in April 2013—led a spreading uprising by Sunni militants that had begun taking control of Iraqi cities in January 2014. When the threat to the controversial regime of Prime Minister Nūrī al-Mālikī became dire in mid-June 2014, after ISIL fighters seized the northern city of Mosul (the second largest city in Iraq) and then Tikrīt (only about 100 miles [160 km] north of Baghdad), the United States took action. Obama—who was blamed for the uprising by some critics who claimed that he had removed U.S. forces too soon—sent some 300 U.S. Special Operations soldiers to Iraq as advisers, despite his desire not to return troops there.

The Obama administration also was criticized for a swap of prisoners with the Taliban at the end of May. Five Taliban leaders were freed from confinement at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp in exchange for U.S. Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who had been held captive in Afghanistan since 2009. Politicians from both parties were critical of the administration’s failure to consult Congress (as law required) before freeing Guantánamo detainees, and some Republicans claimed that too much had been given up for Bergdahl, the circumstances of whose capture had come under suspicion.

Many Republicans condemned the president’s use of executive authority to take action on issues not addressed by Congress, notably his imposition of more-stringent carbon emissions standards for power plants beginning in 2030, along with an increase in the minimum wage (to $10.10 per hour) for federal contract workers. In June Speaker of the House Boehner embodied the anger of many Republicans at the president’s initiatives by threatening to sue him for misusing his executive powers.

The child migrant border surge, air strikes on ISIL (ISIS), and the 2014 midterm elections

As spring turned to summer, the United States was confronted with a growing crisis on its border with Mexico. Since October 2013 more than 50,000 unaccompanied children—most of them from Central America and many of them fleeing drug-related gang violence—had been taken into custody while trying to enter the United States illegally. The crisis arose against the backdrop of Congress’s acknowledgment that immigration reform had again stalled.

In September Obama ratcheted up the campaign against ISIL, authorizing air strikes inside Syria for the first time and an increase of those in Iraq. He continued to pledge that he would not return U.S. combat troops to the region but asked Congress to approve some $500 million for the training and arming of “moderate” Syrians. As U.S.-led attacks increased, Obama worked to grow the coalition of countries that had committed to confronting ISIL. By the end of the month, some 20 countries were contributing air support or military equipment to the coalition effort, including France, Britain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Qatar, and Bahrain. Dozens of other countries provided humanitarian aid.

Framing the midterm congressional elections in November 2014 as a referendum on the presidency of Obama (whose approval ratings had plummeted to about 40 percent), the Republicans soundly defeated the Democrats to expand their majority in the House and retake control of the Senate. In gaining as many as 12 seats in the House, Republicans were in a position to match their largest majority in that body since 1947, and, by winning back seats in several states that had gone Republican in recent elections but tilted Democratic on the coattails of Obama’s 2008 presidential victory, Republicans gained nine seats in the Senate to reach a total of 54.

Normalizing relations with Cuba, the USA FREEDOM Act, and the Office of Personnel Management data breach

On December 17, 2014, after some 18 months of secret negotiations, Obama and Cuban leader Raúl Castro simultaneously addressed national television audiences to announce the normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba that had been suspended for more than 50 years. Because the embargo on trade with Cuba was codified in U.S. law, rescinding it would require congressional action; however, by May 2015 ferry service between the United States and Cuba had been authorized, and the U.S. government had removed Cuba from its list of states that sponsor terrorism.

In June the Senate passed the USA FREEDOM Act, which curtailed the government’s authority to collect data and made the process by which it requested data through the national security court more transparent. The legislation replaced the USA PATRIOT Act, which had been enacted in the interest of national security in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Edward Snowden’s exposure in 2013 of the government’s bulk collection of phone and Internet records, however, had raised widespread concerns regarding the invasion of privacy. That led the House to pass legislation that would move the data out of the hands of the government to be stored instead by telecommunications companies and accessed by the government only after public requests to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court. After stalling in the Senate long enough for financial authorization of elements of the National Security Agency to lapse temporarily as the PATRIOT Act expired—partly due to the delaying tactics of Republican Sen. Rand Paul, who thought the bill still gave the government too much access, and partly as the result of the opposition of McConnell, the new majority leader, who thought the new limitations under the legislation undermined the government’s security apparatus—the FREEDOM Act was finally passed in the Senate by a 67–32 vote on June 2 and signed into law by Obama.

Just a few days later the issue of data security was once again in the headlines, when U.S. officials announced on June 5 the discovery of a cyberattack on the records of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Initially it was believed that data relating to some four million current and former federal employees had been put at risk. Later it was learned that personal information regarding more than 21 million people had been compromised. The data breach—first detected in April 2015 and confirmed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in May—was believed to have been the work of hackers in China, though it was not clear whether the intent of the attack was espionage or financial gain.