"He has done nothing"

Today, my daughter asked me why people have claimed that President Obama "has done nothing." I have seen this comment spring up lately and have wondered at it. After all, it was President Obama who, in his first 100 days, got a stimulus bill through the House and the Senate, managed to eke the Affordable Care Act by a Republican-controlled (with a 40 out of 100-vote "majority") Senate and has taken a "can do" attitude with respect to America being a strong nation. Our unemployment is down, stocks on Wall Street have recovered and it looks like the housing market is slowly recovering.

Yet Republicans say that Obama has done nothing. But they complained bitterly about him when he did do something (with a largely Democratic legislature) and they freak out whenever he does something with his Executive Power (calling him a dictator or something worse). They claim that he has violated the Constitution, violated our laws and have pretended that they can practice Diplomacy, when that is the prerogative of the Executive (and not of the Speaker of the House who invited an Israeli politician to use the US House and Senate as a backdrop for his re-election campaign; and not the 47 Republican senators who signed on to Freshman Senator Tom Cotton's nastygram to the Ayatollah in Iran).

If President Obama is "doing nothing," why are Republicans rushing around trying to stop what he is doing? If this President has been a "do-nothing" President, why is it that they're trying to repeal his laws?

I suppose Mitch McConnell initiated this whole stance. As a Senator, Obama ran for President with the promise to try to engage the other side. In fact, he wanted to engage everyone, promising to sit down with Iran and discuss differences if that was offered. Republicans had a real problem with that. But McConnell's entire goal was to make this President fail. And when he did not fail to be re-elected, he has persisted in trying to make this Presidency fail—to deny him a legacy, deny him any shred of a hope that he might be seen as a good President by historians. And the entire Republican caucus in Washington has followed suit.

Could it possibly be because his predecessor actually was the worst President in modern US history? Could it be that Mitch McConnell actually acknowledges that? I do note that many members of the Bush administration have been desperately trying to "rehabilitate" the 8 years of a doctrine that justified the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (Pre-emptive attack on Iraq), the complete rejection of the Geneva Accords on torture (a treaty that was negotiated by the Executive and passed through two-thirds of the Senate), the mishandling of a natural disaster followed by an outright refusal to rebuild a major American city while we were wasting money arming an Iraqi army that quickly disintegrated into a civil war.

Oh yes, the previous administration did a lot of things. And each thing they did seemed to be worse than the last. It seemed that every week there was another wholesale attack on an America that stands for Americans, our freedoms, civil liberties, pluralistic society and the ability of Americans to achieve a standard of living better than that of our parents.

If you want to hear complaints about this administration from me, I would ask that the President fulfill his promise to close Guantanamo Prison, the US's only Constitution-Free zone. He also passed the Republican plan for increasing US citizens' access to healthcare. Tested by Republican Governor Romney in Massachusetts and first proposed by Newt Gingrich as an answer to Hillary Clinton's proposal for a single-payer system, it is flawed but will never be fixed as long as there is a Republican majority in either house of Congress. The passage of this Republican plan by Democrats was a futile attempt to get at least one Republican to vote in favor of the plan. They ought to have simply passed a Single-Payer system—it would have invited fewer lawsuits.

But to claim that this President has done nothing assumes stupidity in the listener. This President has done more for the American people than the previous President. After all, if this President hasn't done anything, then why oppose everything he has done, claim that he has done illegal things and try to undo legislation that he has passed?