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.
migrant childrenU.S. Border Patrol agents processing a group of Central American migrants who entered the U.S. near McAllen, Texas, on June 18, 2014.Jennifer Whitney—The New York Times/Redux
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.
McConnell, Mitch: 2014 reelectionMitch McConnell celebrating with his wife, Elaine Chao, after he was reelected to a sixth term in the Senate, 2014.J. Scott Applewhite/AP Images
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.
Castro, Raúl; Obama, BarackU.S. Pres. Barack Obama (right) and Cuban Pres. Raúl Castro making televised addresses to announce the reestablishment of diplomatic relations and the easing of travel restrictions, December 17, 2014. AP Images
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.
data breachRed unlock symbol, indicating a data breach or hack.© weerapat1003/Fotolia
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.