In just a few days, outgoing US President Barack Obama will be leaving the White House for good. A democrat, Obama is the first black American to hold office as president of the United States.
Obama leaves office with only one purported legacy —a health care program that has constitutional infirmites. Worse, the Obama administration is marked with many clumsy mistakes, all bordering on inexcusable negligence, which have caused dire consequences not only to American taxpayers, but to the international community as well.
Obama’s health care program is supposed to provide, as much as possible, free, quality medical assistance to all American citizens, regardless of the state where they reside. To finance the measure, Obama required rich states to share their state’s health care budget with the less well-off ones. Under this scheme, rural communities are to enjoy the same level of health care obtaining in metropolitan areas.
The plan sounds nice, but Obama’s successor in the White House, US President-elect Donald Trump, does not buy it. In fact, Trump is determined to put a stop to it in view of its patent illegality.
Trump’s opposition is anchored on the way the US federal system of government works.
Under the American federal system, the federal government exercises only such powers which are explicitly vested in it by the Constitution of the United States. This means that any government power not vested by the charter in the federal government belongs to the states themselves. For instance, since the US Constitution does not vest in the President the power of executive clemency, the President has no power to pardon convicts. That power is reserved for the states, and it is exercised by the state governor.
Among the powers the US Constitution vests in the federal government are national defense, national finance (that is why the US dollar is the currency throughout the country), and foreign policy. Health care is not among those powers. Being so, the Obama health care plan suffers from constitutional infirmity.
The rich states are against the Obama health care plan not only for legal reasons, but for practical ones. When a rich state is required to share funds raised by that state exclusively from its own resources (and, therefore, independent of federal sourcing), particularly from state taxes (as opposed to federal duties), that is tantamount to requiring that state to sponsor the health expenditures of other states. That imposition is beyond the power of the federal government to undertake.
Moreover, requiring a state to share its exclusive funds with other states means less money to finance the social welfare needs and concerns of the taxpayers of the state from which the money came from in the first place. As expected, the taxpayers concerned are displeased with that arrangement. For example, since New York City taxpayers, as a rule, earn a lot of money, they are required to pay a lot of taxes. Accordingly, they do not want a reduction in the quality of the health care they are accustomed to receive from their state government.
That’s not the only mess Obama created.
When law and order collapsed in Syria years ago, Obama did nothing to stop the then disorganized Islamic fundamentalists in the region from exploiting the situation. Obama complacently believed that the hated Syrian government will eventually collapse on its own demerits.
What happened next was the opposite. The fundamentalists gathered strength, and established a caliphate. Soon enough, the caliphate was exporting violence to the neighboring territories. Worse, the Russians entered the picture and provided military support to the troublemakers. The city of Aleppo is an example. It is now no man’s land, thanks to the regimented destruction in the area sponsored by the Russians. The Middle East, the source of oil for virtually the entire world, has never been this violent and chaotic, all because Obama failed to address the problem.
The same thing happened in the Ukraine. This former soviet socialist republic bolted from the now defunct Soviet Union when it had had enough of the Russian communist yoke. The Russian kingpin, Vladimir Putin, who used to head the dreaded KGB intelligence agency during the soviet era, seized strategic areas in Ukraine and the Crimea so that Russia can have a more strategic foothold in Central Europe. A desperate Ukrainian government sought help from the West. Nothing came from Obama. Now, the Russians are planning their next conquest in the area.
Despite Obama’s protestation that the United States will not tolerate bullying by any country against another country, the world remains a place conducive to trouble. North Korea now claims it has nuclear capability, and with the government of South Korea currently in turmoil, that may be a recipe for trouble. Obama has not done anything about this menace.
After Communist China seized islands in the West Philippine Sea and lost its case in the arbitration tribunal of the United Nations, the US Secretary of State merely responded with a demand that the sea lanes in the area must be kept open for international navigation and commerce.
The speeches of Obama regarding the international scene are full of rhetoric, and lack substance. Motherhood statements are exploited to the hilt. When sensitive matters arise, Obama makes it a point to speak fast, perhaps in the hope that he will not be understood.
During the campaign for the White House last November, Obama and his Democratic Party highlighted all that is objectionable about Trump. Assuming that Trump is everything the democrats allege him to be, then Trump’s election victory is attributable to the failures of Obama and his partymates. It also means that the American voters elected Trump, probably not because of what Trump represents, but because Obama and his fellow democrats made a mess of the United States these past eight years, and they have had enough of such sorry state of affairs.