Obama- An Oral History
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VALERIE JARRETT
Keeping young people out of the system to begin with has to do with everything from reducing the number of suspensions and expulsions to improving the level of education to ensuring we have after-school and summer-job programs.
RON DAVIS
Once a kid is suspended and/or arrested for the first time, then the likelihood of being rearrested grows exponentially. Imagine if you catch that kid with a spray can getting ready to mark that train or jump the turnstile, and you had a program for him—something to [fill] the idle time that he or she may have, something to even address the issues they may be having at home which is causing them to act out. Imagine those services and you have a likelihood that the kid will go in a different direction, never being entered into the criminal-justice system.
VALERIE JARRETT
We made a fair amount of progress, I think. The disappointment was really not being able to get meaningful legislation through that would give judges what they wanted, which was more discretion. Eric Holder directed prosecutors to use their discretion, but we wanted to give the judges the discretion as well.
CHRISTOPHER KANG
There’s this myth that’s been built up that the president and the White House didn’t care about judicial nominations early on. In particular, in people’s minds they have this May 2001 press conference that President Bush did with a number of his appellate nominees. He brought them [into the East Room] and did a big speech on judges and the importance of them. I don’t think that those comparisons are fair, and I don’t think that they really reflect where the president’s priorities were, when you take into consideration the fact that he did have two Supreme Court vacancies to fill in his first two years.
BARBARA BOXER
It was really wonderful that he chose two women.143 You know, he could have said, “I’m doing one.” There’s a lot of tokenism in the world today, and I thought that was a strong statement.
BILL DAUSTER
We had no problems with Sotomayor and Kagan. They were very good appointments, but that wasn’t where the filibustering occurred. It was occurring in places like the DC Circuit [of Appeals], where Republicans just said, There are enough judges there, even though there were several vacancies. That is to say, they were going to try and maintain a political balance that was in the DC Circuit. That was early in the ramping up of obstruction.
CHRISTOPHER KANG
As early as 2009 and 2010, Republicans started to vote against and block lower-court, even district-court judges. They would require a cloture vote on noncontroversial circuit-court nominees, the idea being that We’re going to make the other side burn as much time as possible so they can’t achieve anything legislatively.
SAXBY CHAMBLISS
R-Georgia, Eighth District, US House of Representatives (1995–2003)
R-Georgia, US Senate (2003–2015)
It was pretty obvious early on that one of the goals of the Obama administration was to put as many liberal judges as they could, particularly on circuit courts, and it’s pretty obvious that, on the other side, McConnell wanted to make sure that didn’t happen. So that’s where the stalemate, the slowing down on the process, came from.
BILL DAUSTER
McConnell was slow-walking the confirmation process. He would dribble out district-court judges. Things that we used to do by unanimous consent, they’d have to force us to have roll-call votes on. And they caused us to have to file cloture on more district judges. Ninety percent of the district judges that had ever had cloture petitions were during McConnell’s time.
CHRISTOPHER KANG
It’s a little bit frustrating, the idea that he didn’t care as much or that the numbers didn’t show, because he didn’t have as many confirmations or nominations as President Bush did early on . . . There probably was some sense of priorities about passing another piece of legislation over allowing Republicans to burn floor time. So at some point, there was a bit of give-and-take, but there’s no question that in the second term, there’s more that you could see visibly. In part that was because, having lost the House in 2011, there wasn’t as much legislating being done. You could focus more on the Senate, where you didn’t need the House to confirm anybody. So I think there was just more emphasis placed on confirmations generally, such that you had the most judges confirmed in that 113th Congress than you had had in decades.144
SAXBY CHAMBLISS
Mitch was a good minority leader, and he knew how to handle the process. He was successful in slowing it down, and that was one of the major reasons why Harry Reid changed the rules on us.145 Once he changed that rule, then obviously you only had to have 51 votes. So the process was speeded up a little bit in the president’s [second] term . . . I’d never seen anything like that done before. There had been conversation about it. Back during the Bush years, when we had to have sixty votes, we were in control and the Democrats were slow-walking President Bush’s nominees. There was some conversation about changing the rule, but ultimately we didn’t do it. The one really good thing that the Senate had always adhered to was the minority had certain rights. Those rights were guaranteed by the sixty-vote requirement. Once you eliminated that, you became more like the House. The changing of that rule, even though our Democratic friends voted for it, some of ’em were not happy about it.
CHRISTOPHER KANG
The judiciary is often the longest-lasting part of a president’s legacy. I don’t know, with all that President Obama accomplished, that that will necessarily be true for him, but oftentimes when people think about that, they think about the Supreme Court, and one reason there’s a bit of a sour taste in people’s mouths with respect to the judges was just how far Senate Republicans went to obstruct the nomination of Chief Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, to not even give him a hearing.
BRIAN DEESE
Not only would they not hold a hearing or a vote, but they wouldn’t even meet with the guy.
CHRISTOPHER KANG
But I also think about the district-court and the circuit-court judges . . . In terms of accomplishments, President Obama having four judges confirmed to the DC Circuit [of Appeals] was probably one of the biggest and most lasting that he will have had in terms of that court often being viewed as the second-highest court in the land. But then, I also think more broadly about the president’s emphasis and success on trying to increase the diversity of the courts and making sure that the judiciary, as a democratic institution, really reflected the people that it served.
BILL DAUSTER
There is a story of accomplishment to tell there about African American, LGBT, women—people on the benches—and they can be proud of that accomplishment. People bring their experience to the court.
CHRISTOPHER KANG
The hope was that over time, you set these benchmarks for other presidents to meet. Having a more diverse judiciary will help instill greater public confidence in the institution, and also the role-modeling effect is incredibly important. There had only been one openly gay judge confirmed in history before President [Obama’s appointments]. He appointed another [eleven]. Same with Asian Americans—there had only been eight to the bench serving when he took office. There are three times as many now. You start looking at those places where he made a difference, and people start thinking of themselves as becoming federal judges.
BEN LABOLT
Inclusivity and equality were some of the key themes that the Obama administration will be recognized for, and that’s down at every level. Those were the small things, like appointing openly gay judges and ambassadors. They seem small individually, but they matter a lot collectively.
CHRISTOPHER KANG
I was always struck by the fact that the first federal judge to strike down a state constitution’s ban on same-sex marriage was a district-court judge appointed by President Obama in Utah. That’s not to say that another judge wouldn’t have come to the same conclusion, but the fact of the matter was that Judge Robert Shelby was the f
irst. That showed just how much influence and impact even a district-court judge could have on a conversation, on the direction of a law and on, really, the future of our country. That’s an incredibly important part of the president’s legacy that we won’t really be able to measure for decades out but, looking back, will be just as important as all of the legislative accomplishments he had, or foreign-policy accomplishments he had, or regulations that he did.
ARNE DUNCAN
People understood what he stood for. I don’t think it was an accident that you had such a cohesive cabinet. That you didn’t have scandals and drama that you’d have in other places.
BRANDON HURLBUT
You look at all these different presidencies and they usually have some sort of scandal, and it didn’t happen!
TREVOR TIMM
Executive Director, Freedom of the Press Foundation (2012– )
How do you define “scandal”? Certainly Barack Obama and the Obama family were role models in a personal capacity to millions of Americans, and rightly so. There were certainly no personal scandals. There were no corruption scandals, and no one accused Barack Obama of doing what, for example, Donald Trump does every day. He was looked at as a highly moral person and they were a highly moral family, at least on the personal side. But certainly the NSA revelation should constitute a major scandal. Here we had a constitutional-law professor who campaigned against the excesses of the NSA during the Bush administration146—literally talking about warrantless wiretapping, about how he would protect whistle-blowers who would come forward with information and be the most transparent administration ever—yet, from the start, he not only basically signed off on surveillance that had been occurring during the Bush years, but essentially doubled down on it.
TERRY SZUPLAT
So when I hear the word scandal, I always take that to mean, and I think most Americans understand that to mean, the misconduct or misbehavior of government officials. So Iran-Contra was a scandal because it was about the behavior and choices of the Reagan administration. Lewinsky was a scandal because it was about the personal misconduct and behavior of the president. So, by that definition, it’s absolutely correct to say that the Obama White House was indeed scandal-free. Snowden, that was not a scandal in that sense.
TREVOR TIMM
Part of our mission was to encourage more whistle-blowers to come forward and advocate for journalists to be more aggressive on reporting on secret government programs, especially surveillance. You know, basically our wildest dreams came true when the most well-known whistle-blower of our generation came to two of our board members directly, and, June 6, all of a sudden you had a story in the Guardian where we found out that the NSA had been collecting every single American’s phone-call records for years . . . and for the next five days there was a giant scoop each day, to the point where we were sitting in meetings figuring out how to react to the day-before scoop and the next one that would come after that.
SAXBY CHAMBLISS
I’d been in the intel world my last two years in the House, and all twelve years in the Senate I was on the Intel Committee. So by the time the Snowden event occurred, I was obviously well versed in the ways of the day-to-day practices of the seventeen intelligence agencies, but in this case particularly, what the NSA did relative to gathering information—how they did it, what they used it for, and all of those critical issues that they were required to deal with from a gathering standpoint—I knew that the NSA had limitations on what they could gather relative to US citizens. I knew that the people at NSA were professional. They were aware of sensitivities and the law relative to gathering information on US citizens.
TERRY SZUPLAT
Snowden was an individual in the bureaucracy choosing to leak massive amounts of classified information, and he wasn’t the first leaker. He wasn’t the last leaker. He was not an Obama-administration official. He was not an Obama-administration appointee. From my understanding, he would have done that no matter who the president was. And so I don’t think that the fact that the disclosures occurred was “an Obama scandal.” I’d be happy to have that discussion-debate with anybody, but scandals, the way we understand them, are about the misconduct and misbehavior of administration officials, and Snowden was not such a person.
TREVOR TIMM
Now, it wasn’t personally Barack Obama who was doing all of this, but I certainly thought this was a scandal of the highest order that involved multiple intelligence agencies, the FBI, the Department of Justice. All of this was done in complete secrecy. The major program that everyone remembers—the one that I mentioned, about the NSA collecting all of our telephone records—was not actually written into law. They basically took a provision of the Patriot Act and worked it beyond recognition to the point where they were doing this when none of the American people knew about it, a lot of Congress members didn’t know about it, and using a public law in which they created a radical interpretation which they kept completely secret.
SAXBY CHAMBLISS
So when all of this broke, some folks on our side—Senator [Rand] Paul wasn’t maybe as outspoken as some on the [Democratic] side—but members of the Senate had a lot of things to say about what was going on who, frankly, didn’t know what they were talking about. They didn’t know that the folks at NSA knew that they were required to get a warrant. There were just these broad statements made, including by Snowden, that gave the impression to the American public and folks all around the world that NSA was listening in on phone conversations of average ordinary Americans, and that just simply was not the case.
TREVOR TIMM
The NSA surveillance revelations were certainly a black mark on the Obama administration, but then, separately, there was also this crackdown on whistle-blowers and leakers, which happened around the same time, actually, just before the Snowden revelations, where the Obama Justice Department started prosecuting more sources for journalists than all other administrations combined. They got the emails of Fox News reporter James Rosen and were engaged in leak prosecutions like none you [had] ever seen. They secretly got the records of twenty AP phone lines that affected over a hundred AP journalists.
MATTHEW MILLER
That was a huge mistake by the department. The way they handled that, it rightly blew up in their faces. And it partly blew up in their faces because it was a culmination of things. All of the cases that had been brought against leakers, I think, were conflated. You could make a strong argument that people who leaked classified information [and] didn’t do it for a noble purpose—they did it not because they’re trying to expose wrongdoing, but because either they wanted to ingratiate themselves with a reporter or they wanted to settle a score against an agency that they thought had done them wrong. [They] leaked information that served no whistle-blowing purpose. You could make a good case those people ought to be prosecuted. But all of those cases got wrapped together, and the AP case blew up because it wasn’t just in isolation.
TREVOR TIMM
Everybody kind of forgets about [the AP case] because it was right before the Snowden revelations, but there was a huge backlash around this—not just from First Amendment scholars, but dozens of media organizations really worried that their entire profession was being undermined and threatened. Eric Holder, the attorney general, would later say that some of those incidents were some of his biggest regrets, but it doesn’t mean that the damage wasn’t already done. And if you took those events coupled with the Snowden revelations, you got a fairly damning picture of how the Obama administration expanded entrenched surveillance capabilities that could be very corrosive to a democracy.
TERRY SZUPLAT
That NSA program predated Obama, and my understanding of it was, not only did it predate Obama, but that when it came to the attention of the president and his most senior advisors, they worked diligently to put in limits to that program. So, again, this was one of the things where the programs that Snowden leaked and disclosed, I don’t think those were “Obama program
s.” They were programs that had been conducted prior to Obama and under Obama, but I think the Obama administration brought more structure and rigor and standards and transparency to it.
SAXBY CHAMBLISS
He knew, like me, what the NSA was doing, and he was put in the same difficult box that myself and other members on the Senate Intelligence Committee were. We knew what happened but couldn’t give all the details of it. It’s classified, yet we had to respond to and deal with colleagues and a media that thought all these horrible things were being done when, in fact, they really weren’t being done.
TYLER MORAN
The White House effort [for immigration reform in 2013] was definitely a stealth operation . . . Behind the scenes, we gave a ton of bipartisan briefings. In the Senate, you had this Gang of Eight with Republicans who really believed they needed to reach out to Latinos and that they really had to push for [legislation].147
CECILIA MUÑOZ
In the administration, we had long since drafted a bill. We had a bill drafted in 2010. So we took that bill back out, revised it, [and] essentially fed pieces of that bill to the Gang of Eight in order to speed up the process. The 2013 bill was big and complex, obviously, and it was important to the president that we contribute in whatever way that was most useful . . . The Gang of Eight dynamic was such that it was important to be behind the scenes, so that’s what we did.
TYLER MORAN
Lots of other Republicans were supportive, but they just felt nervous about any type of backlash—particularly if you looked at the composition of Republicans that ultimately came forward and voted for the bill, they didn’t until there was this Corker-Hoeven Amendment, which basically put a shitload of resources on the southern border. So much so that Border Patrol could hold hands or something.148 It was this unnecessary amount of resources, but it brought on a ton more votes, and, if you think about the Senate, the fact that there were sixty-eight votes was insane. That doesn’t happen on a huge, huge, huge piece of legislation . . . but there was also some naïveté about momentum that would be created for the House to then move.