Considered Guilty: How Republicans tried to stifle Obama Presidency & A Review of Conceptualized US Tax Cuts

By Efiong E. Aniatang

Since 1776, only white men were elected US President. But by November 2008, Senator Barack Obama, with a different skin color, was elected for two terms of eight years. By January 2009, when he was sworn in, he inherited from George W. Bush, America that was seriously and dangerously fatigued by lack of adequate liquidity within the banking and financial systems. The years of 2008 to 2009 provided real managerial and leadership challenges for President Obama but with focused diligence and systematic endurance; he worked with the Federal Reserve Bank to restore sanctity, decorum, and orderly wealth to the country.

However, the likes of John Boehner, Paul Ryan, and Mitch McConnell instigated a Republican revolution to stifle, oppose, and insult him routinely. They all refused to cooperate and collaborate with his administration. Nonetheless, President Obama, having sensed their demeaning attitudes, became more determined to succeed as a Democratic US President. He went further and signed into law the first Affordable Care Act for the country, which has reportedly serviced about twenty million Americans. Republicans tried and failed sixty times to repeal that law.

Included also is a chapter on a sensitive subject of "Tax Cuts in America," with helpful explanatory theoretical details which I consider illuminating.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
• Release date: May 31, 2024
• ISBN: 9781646545674

Book preview

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

I. Republicans in Congress Failed in Their Governance Duty

II. The 2014 US Elections

III. The Affordable Care Act

IV. Practice of US Governance Management Failed

V. 2012 Elections

VI. Report of the President's Committee on Administrative Management

VII. The Presidential Swearing-in Is an Investiture

VIII. The Political Gift of Ancient Americans Was Easily Ignored

IX. Republican Meeting against Obama on Swearing-In Night of January 2009

X. Nigeria as My Country of Birth

XI. Governance Advice from Alexis de Tocqueville (1835)

XII. The Notion of the Trinity

XIII. Tocqueville and Sovereignty

XIV. The President of the United States

XV. John Dewey's Intuitive Advice

XVI. Did Congressional Republicans Understand Leadership During Obama Presidency?

XVII. Integrity in Leadership

XVIII. The Self-Organizing Leadership

XIX. Organizing Change from Complexity Science

XX. The Issue of Tax Cuts in America

XXI. US 2016 Presidential Elections

Conclusion

Bibliography

Appendix One

Appendix Two

Appendix Three

About the Author

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Considered Guilty

How Republicans tried to stifle Obama Presidency & A Review of Conceptualized US Tax Cuts

Efiong E. Aniatang

Copyright © 2021 Efiong E. Aniatang

All rights reserved

First Edition

Fulton Books, Inc.

Meadville, PA

Published by Fulton Books 2021

ISBN 978-1-64654-566-7 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63985-051-8 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-64654-567-4 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Dedication

For all the support, disorganized tables, and long hours from normal relationships, this publication is dedicated to my wife, Denise, and our daughter, Queen.

Preface

During the presidency of Barack Obama during January 2009 to January 2017, there were real threats schemed and fomented by congressional Republicans solely to frustrate him and thereby portray him as ineffective and not fit to serve as US president. Their overall goals were to make him look incompetent and unfit for the job so they all could disdainfully ensure his defeat, with the possibility of making him a one-term president, as had been crudely called for by their Senate leader, Mitch McConnell. But they all failed—for Barack Obama went on to serve two four-year terms.

The stage had actually been set by the likes of John Boehner as Speaker of the House of Representatives, followed by his successor by the name of Paul Ryan, including all their Republicans in Congress. In order to achieve their ill-fated designs, they tried all possible methods they could employ to frustrate President Barack Obama and publicly derided him personally, including his wife, Michelle Obama.

Chapter 2 covers 2014 elections, chapter 5 covers 2012 elections, and chapter 21 covers the troubling 2016 elections which were immersed and engrossed in possible criminal acts with Russian intelligence agents, as were encouraged by the Donald Trump campaign mechanism.

Chapter 3, on the other hand, was designed to catalogue the first fifty-four occasions House Republicans employed to kill and destroy the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the first in American history.

Chapters 6, 7, 8, and 9 remind several Americans about the relevance and significance of the nature of American democratic governance as previously designed.

Chapters 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15, including chapters 16, 17, 18, and 19 were developed to instruct and duly teach the privileges, prerogatives, the essentials, and the necessary elements deemed important for understanding real requisites, and the fundamentals and applications in the all important subjects of ethics and integrity, as embodied in management and leadership studies in public policy and administration.

Finally, the vital economic and political subject matter, commonly known as tax cuts in America, was explained in chapter 20—to the degree that, generally, there has not been any evidence that tax cuts in America do reduce unemployment. Systematically and constantly, tax cuts have been known to reduce government revenues and increase America's budget deficits—while failing to increase employment.

I. Republicans in Congress Failed in Their Governance Duty

It was rather surprising and lackluster that throughout the 2014 Mid-Term Elections campaigns, the Republican candidates for the House of Representatives and the United States Senate failed to offer any new ideas or parameters that would improve the country's economy, remove political gridlock or the serious malfunctioning of Congress that could usher in a profound period of cooperation and collaboration for public good. For people who disdain government as big government but are always willing and prepared to spend millions of dollars to win their respective seats in Congress or make themselves pointedly available to receive millions of dollars from wealthy donors of their party to pay for their election campaigns, it had become increasingly difficult to accept, to argue, and to assert that they are in politics to serve the common man, or what is usually referred to as the Middle Class Americans. Repeatedly, they demonstrated that they are not in US Congress to serve and answer to their respective electorates cum the country but to serve their individual political desires, motives, careers, and strategic interests. In many cases also, they individually have been able to pile up millions of dollars for themselves and their campaigns in the process.

I was deeply disappointed by the standards of political campaigns, the tone and language of the campaigns, and the individual behavior of candidates, who in the main behaved and spoke as if they all, individually and collectively as Republicans, were contesting against President Barack Obama. Although it was more than obvious that President Obama was not a candidate against anyone during the election cycle, yet their campaigns' rhetoric and pretentious phrases and sentences were consciously immersed and couched in indolent and name-calling chatters, and the blinding appeal was suddenly provoked and became pathetically idiotic and revolting to decent and literate people. But that Republican approach to win elections in America of all places has resulted in silliness and rhetorical illiteracy. Undoubtedly, it was evident in their presentations and arguments that they all were contesting in all their individual districts and states against President Barack Obama.

Their deliberate collective attitude and rational illustrated something cynical and very dangerous to me: that they all disrespected President Obama as the President of the United States and were spiteful of him as an individual person, though he had been overwhelmingly elected twice as the executive President of the United States, first in November 2008 and then in November 2012. On these two instances, he defeated Republican John McCain in 2008 and Republican Mitt Romney in 2012.

It was the Congressional Republicans' collective decision to block intentionally all Presidential initiatives that had been submitted to Congressional House of Representatives since after the 2010 Mid-Term elections. Unaware of their disgraceful act and pure incompetence, in public policy initiatives of the United States, some of them arrogantly but consistently intoned the insulting mantra that the President should "come and work with us."

I heard such disgraceful statements from Paul Ryan and Eric Canter during certain Sunday morning TV shows. At that stage, it became transparently evident that Congressional Republicans did not in the least wish, nor did they even consider, working in a professional, respectful, and legislative manner and format with President Barack Obama, as a Democrat. Any suggestion by professional pundits otherwise would clearly illustrate the utter indifference or ignorance on the part of such individuals or personalities. There was never an illustrated candor by the Republicans in Congress at any point during the Obama presidency that could speak the language of understanding, respectability, coherence, and an iota of desire to work with him for the country. From my perspective, it had been their hidden and unspoken noteworthiness to ignore and ridicule Barack Obama to the extent that would heighten his unpopularity in the eyes of fellow Republicans, because they collectively wanted to portray him as ineffective, unnecessary, irrelevant and unworthy.

II. The 2014 US Elections

The Republican 2014 midterm election campaigns fully opened up their emptiness and disgust in political objectivity. It also openly offered their lack of meaningful understanding and appreciation of political interaction and finesse, including spoken and written language and rhetoric, as well as clear understanding of political reasonableness that can open up avenues and paths for reconciliatory mindsets and resolutions.

It was indisputably clear that none of them showed a willingness to listen to and weigh a none-party member's gratuitous musings or contemplations for the middle ground that could lead to clarity and awareness in political dialogue for public good.

For Mitch McConnell, who showed his animalistic tendencies toward Barack Obama and exclaimed with delightful fanfare and spurious smile, as reported in the October 23, 2010, National Journal publication that the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one term President said it all. Obviously, his main duty and mission as the Republican Minority Leader of the US Senate, at that time, was to deny President Obama a second term. He was not just talking aloud his intentions; he was also daring the President with a politically well-manicured Republican agenda to limit President Obama to just one term of four years in office. Although his designated hope and plan failed woefully after the 2012 Presidential Elections, he was still not prepared, nor willing, to accept a Democrat Barack Obama as a duly elected Executive President of the United States.

Because he lacked any political and social decency, he never apologized to the President for his remarkable illicit statement.

Therefore, I can conclude, without any fear of contradictions from him or anybody else, that he was fully aware of the political implications, and crude purpose, as well as the hidden nefarious reason of that statement.

Perhaps he was the only Republican in America who had the evident status and personal assumptive belief in government to so publicly display and spill out such disgusting hatred and agonizing spite and coupled with offensive disrespect to America's Head of State so publicly without fear. Maybe he even must have considered himself the ultimate Republican authority to express in public what others must have mischievously said and restated in private what their real intentions and plans were. Consequently, by 2012 Presidential Elections, he recognized in full glare and overwhelming temperate clarity that hate and bigotry do not always win in a society of decent, knowledgeable, educated, and understanding citizens. Rather, in most cases, hate and insincerity are notably always accompanied by disastrous calamity enveloped in downright failures and catastrophes.

There could have been occasions that such hate and spite might have worked to his insidious objective and aspiration and take away all the heartwarming expectations of the many in society and country. There must have been a possibility that such a vicious wish could have been manipulated to his secluded satisfaction. But at that time and at that particular moment, he was denied that inglorious appetite, for it collapsed and splashed all over his face and body parts so he could learn the eternal lesson of the magnificence of love and respectability of other human beings, be they the President of the United States or another person with unfamiliar name, or even a child who has not yet been spoilt by mediocrity and spiteful indiscretion. Very surprisingly, I failed to hear or read about the outcry of intelligent and knowledgeable Americans, who sat down silently and swallowed this brutal indiscretion and political nightmarish stupidity and absurdity, employed at the highest level of American democratic governance in Washington, DC, by Republican Mitch McConnell.

It also happened that at the same period, one Donald J. Trump, who was known to be in real estate building business as a leftover from his late father, came up with his own idiosyncratic assertions that Barrack Obama was not good enough to have been accepted into Harvard Law School, indicating and stressing that Barrack Obama was not a good enough student to have even be admitted and performed so satisfactorily in Harvard Law School. These were certain assumptions held jointly by Mitch McConnell and Donald J. Trump as fellow Republicans, affirming my suspicion that both men, with their different skin color from that of Barrack Obama, felt they were superior due only to their skin color.

Trump's misguided lies about Obama's citizenship were disgraceful as they were equally stupid. After all, Obama's mother was born in Kansas, USA, although his father was from Kenya in Africa. But Barack Obama was born in America and became an American citizen much as Donald Trump was. Trump's desire to disqualify Obama and his presidency clearly spotlighted Donald J. Trump as a racist and a nincompoop, capable of direct and deliberate misrepresentation of facts. Obviously, such people have complete disdain for the truth. Under such reckless circumstances, why should any respectable person ever honor his words and his statements? There are no reasons and no fathomable grounds to give such individuals the benefit of the doubt.

Meanwhile, this Donald Trump was reported to have declared three bankruptcies of three different companies. Why did these happen? Such foreclosures could only be possible due to one's indifference to systematic critical care and attention to details in managing such companies. People who lack sufficient attention to details often fail in the management of organizations, particularly in the private sector as well as the non-profit sector. There are always various analyses performed in the planning for profit maximization of individual companies and organizations. There are also detailed daily accounting and financial transactions of such companies which must be critically evaluated for required management results, including efficacy, market worth, company value, daily, monthly, and annually.

Such managerial tools are usually accompanied by internal control, structured for meaningful control of all phases of the companies' operations. In the private sector, these are always followed by monthly, quarterly, and yearly reports which jointly form the basis for internal and external audits; with the latter meant for deliberations by the Board of Directors during board meetings. Could it therefore mean that these prescribed managerial tools were not in place, duly enforced, in the Trump Organization? Their deliberate omissions or careless exclusions were prerequisites for companies' failures and, by extension, management failure.

For me, it reminded me of a survey conducted by Culture and Media Institute in 2010 but reported by Brian Fitzpatrick, which resulted in the following published major findings that

74 percent of majorities of every major demographic group, say, they believe moral values in America are weaker than they were twenty years ago.

48 percent say moral values are much weaker than they were twenty years ago.

68 percent, including majorities of virtually every demographic group, say the media-entertainment and news alike—are having a detrimental effect on morals in America.

64 percent agree the news and entertainment media exercise powerful influence over American moral values. In fact, the substantial Majority (74 percent) who believe moral values are weaker than twenty years ago consider the media to be the second greatest influence on moral values after parents and families. (www.cultureandmediainstitute.org).

Although I realized that the report referred to had separated Americans into Orthodox, Progressive, and Independent value systems, it shocked me that the so-called Conservative ideologies and fantasies in America were absent in their survey and reporting. Unless of course, Conservative ideologies were carefully buried in and reported within the sample totals of the Orthodox 31 percent and the Independents with 46 percent of the public.

It was the firm of Fabrizio, McLaughlin, and Associates which conducted this survey in December 4–8, 2006, using a collected data of two thousand American citizens aged eighteen or more years (p. 8 of 43).

Without disagreeing much with the statistical perception and findings, I have come to be convinced that with Republican Congressional leaders like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, who controlled both Houses of Congress by January 2015, while Obama still remained as the Executive President of the United States, there would be artificial increases in non-cooperation and non-collaboration, exemplified mistrust, and misunderstanding, likely to result in another and more potential government shutdowns in or within 2015 and 2016, for any and all non-disciplined reasons and excuses.

Surprisingly, Mitch McConnell, after winning the 2014 senate reelection and realizing that he was to become the Senate Majority Leader by January 2015, clandestinely and shamefully remarked that there will be no government shutdown.

To me, that statement was loaded. It revealed that he probably knew of his party's plans to shut down the US Federal Government in 2013 but refused to stop such hideous plans because he was not the Senate leader. That is why he cannot be considered credible and trustworthy.

By January 2015, it was reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer that he was willing to challenge President Obama on immigration, Cuba, coal, and pipeline. Mitch McConnell and John Boehner were known to be planning to challenge President Obama on virtually any issues that they two and their party stalwarts disagreed fundamentally with the Democratic Party President.

That explained why Mitch McConnell, as Senate Majority Leader, deliberately delayed Senate confirmation of Loretta Lynch as US Attorney General. In fact, his disgust was manifested in his so-called congratulatory message to her immediately after her Senate approval, in which he referred to her as a Soror. This was a remarkable gesture by Mitch McConnell to openly display his displeasure that a woman of color, although well qualified, was not good enough to be the US Attorney General.

I know the mystical implication of the word Soror, for it is used to refer to women members highly elevated in the arts and sciences of the craft, over several membership years. Why was it so hard for Mitch McConnell to have respectfully congratulated her as Attorney General Loretta Lynch? This was yet another racially motivated insulting episode of Mitch McConnell.

After the election, it was known that their party, the Republican Party, would control 54 out of 100 seats in the US Senate and 247 out of 435 in the US House of Representatives, so according to their plans, they were poised to have their way in most, if not all, of any political differences or disagreements, because they reckoned that President Obama would be weakened and their solutions and controlling influences made easier.

The necessity of unanimity in public bodies, or of something approaching such, had been founded upon a supposition that it would contribute to security. But its real operation and focus were to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of the government, and to substitute the pleasure, caprice, or artifices and pretenses of an insignificant, turbulent, or corrupt junto, to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable Majority (Hertzberg, 2013).

Former Senate Majority Leader, Senator Harry Reid, knew very well how intransigent and truant and as difficult Mitch McConnell was when he was Minority Leader.

Oftentimes, Senator McConnell knowingly refused to understand what unanimity meant in government public policy deliberations because he was determined to have his selfish ways and exhibit his filthy persona.

His real and inward clandestine purposes and plans were to embarrass President Obama and his administration at every turn and on every event. Objective historians will come to note and confirm that he did not believe President Obama ought to be duly elected President, partly because in all his life, Mitch McConnell was used to seeing only men with his skin color elected President of the United States.

It would have been my dream joy to see Senator Reed, as US Senate Leader, repay and retaliate against this Mitch McConnell in ways that the country can discover his inward true self. It has been evident that since 1776, the Presidents of the United States have been men of Mitch McConnell's skin color, usually referred to as white men, and no women.

Quite unfortunately for America as a nation, no elderly or respectable Republican, past and present, had publicly challenged these Republican leaders in Congress for fear of retribution, public assault, accompanied by public insults. So it will be the country that will again match in political darkness through the labyrinth of fear, insanity, instability, and international disgrace, fomented by conscious malady.

By the same token, again during the 2014 midterm elections, I saw and heard Tom Cotton of Arkansas State on TV, loudly appealing to his fellow Arkansans to elect him as their new Senator so he could go to Washington and fight Obama. Is this provided for in the US Constitution?

If not, who gave Tom Cotton, during his campaigns for Congressional seat as potential US Senator, the right and the authority to threaten the President of the United States and the presidency? It was a remarkably filthy type of campaigns and politics.

Such a man, with such insane political rhetoric, should have been rejected by the State of Arkansas as a potential US Senator because true to his frame of mind, he became a public political nuisance within a few weeks in Congress.

Not surprisingly, it was this same Tom Cotton, as a sixty-day-old Senator, who addressed a direct letter to the Iran leadership, threatening the demise of Iran nuclear negotiations as an affront to President Obama, whom he and other Republicans were bent on frustrating from all fronts. By that action, Senator Tom Cotton ridiculed America's democratic governance and made US Senate look disoriented, and dysfunctional while making US Senators look unaccountable, uncontrollable, and irresponsible. In fact, by such threat to the President by name and the institution of the presidency, Tom Cotton ought to have disqualified himself from the Senate or, alternatively, be removed from the Senate by fellow senators. If not, then there is grounded impotency in the work of the US Senate, which