George Walker Bush
George Bush
Main
president of United States
in full George Walker Bush
born July 6, 1946, New Haven, Conn., U.S.
43rd president of the United States (2001–09), who led his country’s
response to the terrorist September 11 attacks in 2001 and initiated the
Iraq War in 2003. Narrowly winning the electoral college vote over Vice
Pres. Al Gore in one of the closest and most controversial elections in
American history, George W. Bush became the first person since Benjamin
Harrison in 1888 to be elected president despite having lost the
nationwide popular vote. Before his election as president, Bush was a
businessman and served as governor of Texas (1995–2000). (For a
discussion of the history and nature of the presidency, see presidency
of the United States of America.)
Early life
Bush was the oldest of six children of George Bush, who served as the
41st president of the United States (1989–93), and Barbara Bush. His
paternal grandfather, Prescott Bush, was a U.S. senator from Connecticut
(1952–63). The younger Bush grew up largely in Midland and Houston,
Texas. From 1961 to 1964 he attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass.,
the boarding school from which his father had graduated. He received a
bachelor’s degree in history from Yale University, his father’s and
grandfather’s alma mater, in 1968. Bush was president of his fraternity
and, like his father, a member of Yale’s secretive Skull and Bones
society; unlike his father, he was only an average student and did not
excel in athletics.
In May 1968, two weeks before his graduation from Yale and the
expiration of his student draft deferment, Bush applied as a pilot
trainee in the Texas Air National Guard, whose members were less likely
than regular soldiers to fight in the Vietnam War. Commissioned a second
lieutenant in July 1968, he became a certified fighter pilot in June
1970. In the fall of 1970, he applied for admission to the University of
Texas law school but was rejected. Although Bush apparently missed at
least eight months of duty between May 1972 and May 1973, he was granted
an early discharge so that he could start Harvard business school in the
fall of 1973. His spotty military record resurfaced as a campaign issue
in both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections.
After receiving his M.B.A. from Harvard in 1975, Bush returned to
Midland, where he began working for a Bush family friend, an oil and gas
attorney, and later started his own oil and gas firm. He married Laura
Welch, a teacher and librarian, in Midland in 1977. After an
unsuccessful run for Congress in 1978, Bush devoted himself to building
his business. With help from his uncle, who was then raising funds for
Bush’s father’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination,
Bush was able to attract numerous prominent investors. The company
struggled through the early 1980s until the eventual collapse of oil
prices in 1986, when it was purchased by the Harken Energy Corporation.
Bush received Harken stock, a job as a consultant to the company, and a
seat on the company’s board of directors.
In the same year, shortly after his 40th birthday, Bush gave up
drinking alcohol. “I realized,” he later explained, “that alcohol was
beginning to crowd out my energies and could crowd, eventually, my
affections for other people.” His decision was partly the result of a
self-described spiritual awakening and a strengthening of his Christian
faith that had begun the previous year, after a conversation with the
Rev. Billy Graham, a Bush family friend.
After the sale of his company, Bush spent 18 months in Washington,
D.C., working as an adviser and speechwriter in his father’s
presidential campaign. Following the election, he moved to Dallas, where
he and a former business partner organized a group of investors to
purchase the Texas Rangers professional baseball team. Although Bush’s
investment, which he made with a loan he obtained by using his Harken
stock as collateral, was relatively small, his role as managing partner
of the team brought him much exposure in the media and earned him a
reputation as a successful businessman. When Bush’s partnership sold the
team in 1998, Bush received nearly $15 million.
Governor of Texas
In 1994 Bush challenged Democratic incumbent Ann Richards for the
governorship of Texas. A major issue in the campaign concerned Bush’s
sale of all his Harken stock in June 1990, just days before the company
completed a second quarter with heavy losses. An investigation by the
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 1991 into the possibility of
illegal insider trading (trading that takes advantage of information not
available to the public) did not uncover any wrongdoing. Bush won the
election with 53 percent of the vote (compared with 46 percent for
Richards), thus becoming the first child of a U.S. president to be
elected a state governor.
As governor, Bush increased state spending on elementary and
secondary education and made the salaries and promotions of teachers and
administrators contingent on their students’ performance on standardized
tests. His administration increased the number of crimes for which
juveniles could be sentenced to adult prisons following custody in
juvenile detention and lowered to 14 the age at which children could be
tried as adults. Throughout his tenure Bush received international
attention for the brisk use of capital punishment in Texas relative to
other states. Bush signed into law several measures aimed at tort
reform, including one that imposed new limits on punitive damages and
another that narrowed the legal definition of “gross negligence.”
Reelected in 1998 with nearly 70 percent of the vote, Bush became the
first Texas governor to win consecutive four-year terms (in 1972 voters
had approved a referendum that extended the governor’s term from two
years to four).
Bush formally announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential
nomination in June 1999. He described his political philosophy as
“compassionate conservatism,” a view that combined traditional
Republican economic policies with concern for the underprivileged.
Despite Bush’s refusal to give direct answers to questions about his
drinking and possible use of illegal drugs (he implied that he had not
used illegal drugs since 1974), he won the Republican nomination, taking
a strong lead in public opinion polls over Vice Pres. Al Gore, the
Democratic Party nominee; Ralph Nader, the Green Party candidate; and
political journalist Patrick Buchanan, the nominee of the Reform Party.
His running mate was Dick Cheney, former chief of staff for Pres. Gerald
Ford and secretary of defense during the presidency of Bush’s father.
As the general election campaign continued, the gap in the polls
between Bush and Gore narrowed to the closest in any election in the
previous 40 years. On election day the presidency hinged on the 25
electoral votes of Florida, where Bush led Gore by fewer than 1,000
popular votes after a mandatory statewide machine recount. After the
Gore campaign asked for manual recounts in four heavily Democratic
counties, the Bush campaign filed suit in federal court to stop them.
For five weeks the election remained unresolved as Florida state courts
and federal courts heard numerous legal challenges by both campaigns.
Eventually the Florida Supreme Court decided (4–3) to order a statewide
manual recount of the approximately 45,000 “undervotes”—ballots that
machines recorded as not clearly expressing a presidential vote. The
Bush campaign quickly filed an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court,
asking it to delay the recounts until it could hear the case; a stay was
issued by the court on December 9. Three days later, concluding (7–2)
that a fair statewide recount could not be performed in time to meet the
December 18 deadline for certifying the state’s electors, the court
issued a controversial 5–4 decision to reverse the Florida Supreme
Court’s recount order, effectively awarding the presidency to Bush. By
winning Florida, Bush narrowly won the electoral vote over Gore by 271
to 266—only 1 more than the required 270 (one Gore elector abstained).
With his inauguration, Bush became only the second son of a president
to assume the nation’s highest office; the other was John Quincy Adams
(1825–29), the son of John Adams (1797–1801). (See primary source
document: First Inaugural Address.)
Presidency
Early initiatives
Bush was the first Republican president to enjoy a majority in both
houses of Congress since Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s. Taking
advantage of his party’s strength, Bush proposed a $1.6 trillion tax-cut
bill in February 2001. A compromise measure worth $1.35 billion was
passed by Congress in June, despite Democratic objections that it
unfairly benefited the wealthy. In the same month, however, control of
the Senate formally passed to the Democrats after Republican Sen. James
Jeffords left his party to become an independent. Subsequently, many of
Bush’s domestic initiatives encountered significant resistance in the
Senate.
In a report issued in May 2001, the National Energy Policy
Development Group, a task force headed by Vice Pres. Dick Cheney, called
for increasing the production of fossil fuels and nuclear power in the
country by opening more federal lands to mining and oil and gas
exploration, extending tax credits and other subsidies to energy
companies, and easing environmental regulations. In July a coalition of
nonprofit organizations filed suit to make public the secret
deliberations of the task force and the identities of the groups it met
with. (The case was decided in the administration’s favour by the
Supreme Court in June 2004.)
In foreign affairs, the Bush administration announced that the United
States would not abide by the Kyoto Protocol on reducing the emission of
gases responsible for global warming, which the United States had signed
in the last days of the Bill Clinton administration, because the
agreement did not impose emission limits on developing countries and
because it could harm the U.S. economy. The administration also withdrew
from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and attempted to secure
commitments from various governments not to extradite U.S. citizens to
the new International Criminal Court, whose jurisdiction it rejected.
September 11, 2001
The September 11 attacks
On September 11, 2001, Bush faced a crisis that would transform his
presidency. That morning, four American commercial airplanes were
hijacked by Islamic terrorists. Two of the planes were deliberately
crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City,
destroying both towers and collapsing or damaging many surrounding
buildings, and a third was used to destroy part of the Pentagon building
outside Washington, D.C.; the fourth plane crashed outside Pittsburgh,
Pa., after passengers apparently attempted to retake it (see September
11 attacks). The crashes—the worst terrorist incident on U.S.
soil—killed some 3,000 people.
The Bush administration accused radical Islamist Osama bin Laden and
his terrorist network, al-Qaeda (Arabic: “the Base”), of responsibility
for the attacks and charged the Taliban government of Afghanistan with
harbouring bin Laden and his followers (in a videotape in 2004, bin
Laden acknowledged that he was responsible). After assembling an
international military coalition, Bush ordered a massive bombing
campaign against Afghanistan, which began on Oct. 7, 2001. U.S.-led
forces quickly toppled the Taliban government and routed al-Qaeda
fighters, though bin Laden himself remained elusive. In the wake of the
September 11 attacks and during the war in Afghanistan, Bush’s
public-approval ratings were the highest of his presidency, reaching 90
percent in some polls.
U.S. President George W. Bush addressing a crowd as he stands on rubble
at
the World Trade Center site in New York City three days after the
September 11 attacks of 2001.
Domestic measures
Immediately after the September 11 attacks, domestic security and the
threat of terrorism became the chief focus of the Bush administration
and the top priority of government at every level. Declaring a global
“war on terrorism,” Bush announced that the country would not rest until
“every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and
defeated.” (See primary source document: Declaration of War on
Terrorism.) To coordinate the government’s domestic response, the
administration formed a cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security,
which began operating on Jan. 24, 2003.
In October 2001 the Bush administration introduced, and Congress
quickly passed, the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing
Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (the
USA PATRIOT Act), which significantly but temporarily expanded the
search and surveillance powers of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
and other law-enforcement agencies. (Most of the law’s provisions were
made permanent in 2006 by the USA PATRIOT Improvement and
Reauthorization Act.)
In January 2002 Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency
(NSA) to monitor the international telephone calls and e-mail messages
of American citizens and others in the United States without first
obtaining an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as
required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. When the
program was revealed in news reports in December 2005, the
administration insisted that it was justified by a September 2001 joint
Congressional resolution that authorized the president to use “all
necessary and appropriate force” against those responsible for the
September 11 attacks. Subsequent efforts in Congress to provide a legal
basis for the spying became mired in debate over whether
telecommunications companies that cooperated with the NSA should be
granted retroactive immunity against numerous civil lawsuits.
Legislation granting immunity and expanding the NSA’s surveillance
powers was finally passed by Congress and signed by Bush in July 2008.
Treatment of detainees
In January 2002, as the pacification of Afghanistan continued, the
United States began transferring captured Taliban fighters and suspected
al-Qaeda members from Afghanistan to a special prison at the country’s
permanent naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Eventually hundreds of
prisoners were held at the facility without charge and without the legal
means to challenge their detentions (see habeas corpus). The
administration argued that it was not obliged to grant basic
constitutional protections to the prisoners, because the base was
outside U.S. territory; nor was it required to observe the Geneva
Conventions regarding the treatment of prisoners of war and civilians
during wartime, because the conventions did not apply to “unlawful enemy
combatants.” It further maintained that the president had the authority
to place any individual, including an American citizen, in indefinite
military custody without charge by declaring him an enemy combatant.
The prison at Guantánamo became the focus of international
controversy in June 2004, after a confidential report by the
International Committee of the Red Cross found that significant numbers
of prisoners had been interrogated by means of techniques that were
“tantamount to torture.” (The Bush administration had frequently and
vigorously denied that the United States practiced torture.)
The leak of the report came just two months after the publication of
photographs of abusive treatment of prisoners by American soldiers at
the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq (see below Iraq War). In response to the
Abu Ghraib revelations, Congress eventually passed the Detainee
Treatment Act, which banned the “cruel, inhuman, or degrading” treatment
of prisoners in U.S. military custody. Although the measure became law
with Bush’s signature in December 2005, he added a “signing statement”
in which he reserved the right to set aside the law’s restrictions if he
deemed them inconsistent with his constitutional powers as commander in
chief.
In June 2006 the U.S. Supreme Court, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, declared
that the system of military commissions that the administration had
intended to use to try selected prisoners at Guantánamo on charges of
war crimes was in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform
Code of Military Justice, which governs American rules of
courts-martial. Later that year, Congress passed the Military
Commissions Act, which gave the commissions the express statutory basis
that the court had found lacking; the law also prevented enemy
combatants who were not American citizens from challenging their
detention in the federal courts.
In separate programs run by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),
dozens of individuals suspected of involvement in terrorism were
abducted outside the United States and held in secret prisons in eastern
Europe and elsewhere or transferred for interrogation to countries that
routinely practiced torture. Although such extrajudicial transfers, or
“extraordinary renditions,” had taken place during the Clinton
administration, the Bush administration greatly expanded the practice
after the September 11 attacks. Press reports of the renditions in 2005
sparked controversy in Europe and led to official investigations into
whether some European governments had knowingly permitted rendition
flights through their countries’ territories, an apparent violation of
the human rights law of the European Union (see also European law).
In February 2005 the CIA confirmed that some individuals in its
custody had been subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques,”
including waterboarding (simulated drowning), which was generally
regarded as a form of torture under international law. The CIA’s
position that waterboarding did not constitute torture had been based on
the legal opinions of the Justice Department and specifically on a
secret memo issued in 2002 that adopted an unconventionally narrow and
legally questionable definition of torture. After the memo was leaked to
the press in June 2004, the Justice Department rescinded its opinion. In
2005, however, the department issued new secret memos declaring the
legality of enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding.
The new memos were revealed in news reports in 2007, prompting outrage
from critics of the administration. In July 2007 Bush issued an
executive order that prohibited the CIA from using torture or acts of
cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, though the specific
interrogation techniques it was allowed to use remained classified. In
March 2008 Bush vetoed a bill directed specifically at the CIA that
would have prevented the agency from using any interrogation technique,
such as waterboarding, that was not included in the U.S. Army’s field
manual on interrogation.
The Iraq War
Road to war
In September 2002 the administration announced a new National Security
Strategy of the United States of America. It was notable for its
declaration that the United States would act “preemptively,” using
military force if necessary, to forestall or prevent threats to its
security by terrorists or “rogue states” possessing biological,
chemical, or nuclear weapons—so-called weapons of mass destruction.
At the same time, Bush and other high administration officials began
to draw worldwide attention to Iraqi Pres. Ṣaddām Ḥussein and to
suspicions that Iraq possessed or was attempting to develop weapons of
mass destruction in violation of United Nations Security Council
resolutions. In November 2002 the Bush administration successfully
lobbied for a new Security Council resolution providing for the return
of weapons inspectors to Iraq. Soon afterward Bush declared that Iraq
had failed to comply fully with the new resolution and that the country
continued to possess weapons of mass destruction. For several weeks, the
United States and Britain tried to secure support from other Security
Council members for a second resolution explicitly authorizing the use
of force against Iraq (though administration officials insisted that
earlier resolutions provided sufficient legal justification for military
action). In response, France and Russia, while agreeing that Iraq had
failed to cooperate fully with weapons inspectors, argued that the
inspections regime should be continued and strengthened.
As part of the administration’s diplomatic campaign, Bush and other
officials frequently warned that Iraq possessed weapons of mass
destruction, that it was attempting to acquire nuclear weapons, and that
it had long-standing ties to al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.
In his State of the Union address in January 2003, Bush announced that
Iraq had attempted to purchase enriched uranium from Niger for use in
nuclear weapons. The subsequent determination that some intelligence
reports of the purchase had relied on forged documents complicated the
administration’s diplomatic efforts in the United Nations. Meanwhile,
massive peace demonstrations took place in several major cities around
the world.
Operation Iraqi Freedom
Finally, Bush announced the end of U.S. diplomacy. On March 17 he issued
an ultimatum to Ṣaddām, giving him and his immediate family 48 hours to
leave Iraq or face removal by force. Bush also indicated that, even if
Ṣaddām relinquished power, U.S. military forces would enter the country
to search for weapons of mass destruction and to stabilize the new
government.
After Ṣaddām’s public refusal to leave and as the 48-hour deadline
approached, Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, called Operation Iraqi
Freedom, to begin on March 20 (local time). In the ground phase of the
Iraq War, U.S. and British forces quickly overwhelmed the Iraqi army and
irregular Iraqi fighters, and by mid-April they had entered Baghdad and
all other major Iraqi cities and forced Ṣaddām’s regime from power.
In the wake of the invasion, hundreds of sites suspected of producing
or housing weapons of mass destruction within Iraq were investigated. As
the search continued without success into the following year, Bush’s
critics accused the administration of having misled the country into war
by exaggerating the threat posed by Iraq. In 2004 the Iraq Survey Group,
a fact-finding mission comprising American and British experts,
concluded that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction or the
capacity to produce them at the time of the invasion, though it found
evidence that Ṣaddām had planned to reconstitute programs for producing
such weapons once UN sanctions were lifted. In the same year, the
bipartisan 9-11 Commission (the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks
upon the United States) reported that there was no evidence of a
“collaborative operational relationship” between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
Ṣaddām, who went into hiding during the invasion, was captured by U.S.
forces in December 2003 and was executed by the new Iraqi government
three years later.
Occupation and insurgency
Although the Bush administration had planned for a short war,
stabilizing the country after the invasion proved difficult. From May 1,
when Bush declared an end to major combat in Iraq, to the end of
December 2003, more than 200 U.S. soldiers were killed as a result of
attacks by Iraqis. During the next four years the number of U.S.
casualties increased dramatically, reaching more than 900 in 2007 alone.
(The number of Iraqis who died during the invasion or the insurgency is
uncertain.) Widespread sectarian violence, accompanied by regular and
increasingly deadly attacks on military, police, and civilian targets by
militias and terrorist organizations, made large parts of the country
virtually ungovernable. The increasing numbers of U.S. dead and wounded,
the failure to uncover weapons of mass destruction, and the enormous
cost to U.S. taxpayers (approximately $10 billion per month through
2007) gradually eroded public support for the war; by 2005 a clear
majority of Americans believed that it had been a mistake. By the fifth
anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2008, some 4,000 U.S.
soldiers had been killed. As the death toll mounted, Bush’s
public-approval ratings dropped, falling below 30 percent in many polls.
While acknowledging that it had underestimated the tenacity of the
Iraqi resistance, the Bush administration maintained that part of the
blame for the continuing violence lay with Iran, which it accused of
supplying weapons and money to Iraqi-based terrorist groups. In his
State of the Union address in 2002, Bush had warned that Iran (along
with Iraq and North Korea) was part of an “axis of evil” that threatened
the world with its support of terrorism and its ambition to acquire
nuclear weapons. In 2006–07 the United States joined other members of
the Security Council in condemning Iran’s nuclear research program. The
administration’s repeated warnings concerning a possible Iranian nuclear
weapon led to speculation that Bush was contemplating military action
against the country. In December 2007, however, the administration’s
suspicions were contradicted by the National Intelligence Estimate, a
consensus report of U.S. intelligence agencies, which declared with
“high confidence” that in 2003 Iran had abandoned attempts to develop a
nuclear weapon.
Foreign aid
In his State of the Union address in January 2003, Bush proposed an
ambitious program to address the humanitarian crisis created by the
HIV/AIDS pandemic in 15 countries in Africa and the Caribbean. With a
budget of $15 billion over a five-year period, the President’s Emergency
Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) aimed to supply life-extending medications
to 2 million victims of HIV/AIDS, to prevent 7 million new cases of the
disease, and to provide care for 10 million AIDS sufferers and the
orphaned children of AIDS victims. The program was widely praised in the
United States, even by Bush’s critics, and generated enormous goodwill
toward the Bush administration in Africa. Medical professionals and
public health officials welcomed the greater availability of retroviral
drugs but generally objected to the program’s requirement that one-third
of prevention funds be spent on teaching sexual abstinence and marital
fidelity.
In January 2004 the Bush administration established the Millennium
Challenge Corporation to distribute development aid to poor countries
that demonstrated a commitment to democracy, free enterprise, and
transparent governance. The agency’s innovative approach allowed
recipient countries to design and manage their own multiyear programs to
reduce poverty and promote economic growth. By 2008 the corporation had
approved some $5 billion in grant requests, though relatively little of
the money had been dispersed.
The Bush administration’s foreign aid programs were designed to serve
its declared foreign policy goal of promoting democracy abroad,
especially in parts of the world plagued by poverty and war. In eastern
Europe, Bush supported expanding the membership of the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) as a means of securing democracy and
stability in war-ravaged or formerly communist countries. During his
presidency NATO gained seven new members: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia,
Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia.
Domestic affairs
In December 2001 Bush successfully negotiated with the
Democratic-controlled Senate legislation that provided federal funding
to religious, or “faith-based,” charities and social services. The
measure, he argued, would end long-standing discrimination in federal
funding against churches and other religious groups that provided needed
social services in poor communities. The bill was passed by the Senate
despite objections from many Democratic senators that it violated the
constitutional separation of church and state. A White House Office of
Faith-Based and Community Initiatives was created in January 2001.
In 2002 the U.S. economy continued to perform poorly, despite having
recovered from a recession the previous November. Widespread corporate
accounting scandals, some of the largest corporate bankruptcies in U.S.
history, and fears over war and terrorism all contributed to consumer
uncertainty and a prolonged downturn in the financial markets. Despite
the economic turmoil, Bush’s personal popularity enabled the Republicans
to regain a majority in the Senate in midterm elections in November 2002
(though the party also lost three state governorships). With both houses
of Congress under Republican control, Bush secured passage of a second
tax cut of $350 billion in May 2003.
Education
In January 2002 Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act, which
introduced significant changes in the curriculum of the country’s public
elementary, middle, and high schools and dramatically increased federal
regulation of state school systems. Under the law, states were required
to administer yearly tests of the reading and mathematics skills of
public school students and to demonstrate adequate progress toward
raising the scores of all students to a level defined as “proficient” or
higher. Teachers were also required to meet higher standards for
certification. Schools that failed to meet their goals would be subject
to gradually increasing sanctions, eventually including replacement of
staff or closure.
In the first years of the program, supporters pointed to its success
in increasing the test scores of minority students, who historically
performed at lower levels than white students. Indeed, in the 2000
presidential campaign Bush had touted the proposed law as a remedy for
what he called “the soft bigotry of low expectations” faced by the
children of minorities. Critics, however, complained that the federal
government was not providing enough funding to implement the program’s
requirements and that the law had usurped the states’s traditional
control of education as provided for in the Constitution. Others
objected that the law was actually eroding the quality of education by
forcing schools to “teach to the test” while neglecting other parts of
the curriculum, such as history, social science, and art.
U.S. Pres. George W. Bush relaxes with members of the entertainment
committee
after the February 2008 inauguration of the new U.S. embassy in Kigali,
Rwanda.
Medicare
In December 2003 Bush won Congressional approval of the Medicare
Modernization Act (MMA), a reform of the federally sponsored health
insurance program for elderly Americans. Widely recognized as the most
far-reaching overhaul of Medicare to date, the MMA enabled Medicare
enrollees to obtain prescription drug coverage from Medicare through
private insurance companies, which then received a government subsidy;
it also vastly increased the number of private insurance plans through
which enrollees could receive medical benefits. Although many members of
Congress from both parties criticized the MMA as needlessly complex and
expensive (its cost was estimated in January 2004 at $534 billion over
10 years), a bipartisan majority accepted the measure as an imperfect
but necessary compromise that would bring a much-needed insurance
benefit to senior citizens. Some conservative Republicans, however,
rejected the MMA on both fiscal and philosophical grounds, and many
Democrats objected to a provision in the plan that prevented Medicare
administrators from negotiating with pharmaceutical companies for lower
drug prices.
Reelection
In 2004 Bush focused his energies on his campaign for reelection against
his Democratic challenger, U.S. Sen. John Kerry. According to opinion
polls, the candidates entered the fall elections in a virtual dead heat.
Bush’s key campaign platform was his conduct of the war on terrorism,
which he linked with the war in Iraq. Kerry countered that the Iraq War
had been poorly planned and executed and that Bush had neglected
domestic priorities. The election was notable for the prominent role
played by independent political-action groups in organizing and
fund-raising and for the influence of highly partisan blogs as
alternative sources of political news. Bush defeated Kerry with a slim
majority of the electoral and popular vote, and the Republicans
increased their majorities in both the House and the Senate.
Social Security and immigration
The major domestic initiative of Bush’s second term was his proposal to
replace Social Security (the country’s system of government-managed
retirement insurance) with private retirement savings accounts. The
measure attracted little support, however, mainly because it would have
required significant cuts in retirement benefits and heavy borrowing
during the transition to the private system.
Bush also proposed a reform of immigration laws that would have
allowed most of the estimated 12 million people living in the country
illegally to remain temporarily as “guest workers” and to apply for U.S.
citizenship after returning to their home countries and paying a fine
(though citizenship would not be guaranteed). Although the proposal was
supported by some prominent Democrats, including Sen. Edward M. Kennedy
of Massachusetts, most other Democrats and many members of Bush’s own
party remained wary of the idea. Some conservative critics denounced the
program as an amnesty that would encourage a new wave of illegal
immigration, while liberal opponents warned that it would create a
permanent underclass of poor and disenfranchised workers. More than two
years of debate produced no reform legislation, though Bush did sign a
measure that authorized the construction of a 700-mile (1,127-km) fence
along the U.S.-Mexican border.
Environmental and science policy
The Bush administration’s environmental policies reflected its
conviction that economic development could be accomplished without
serious harm to the environment and that limits on development, where
necessary, should be achieved through voluntary cooperation by industry
rather than regulation by government. In keeping with the
recommendations of the energy task force, the administration’s proposed
Clear Skies Act would have introduced a cap-and-trade system to regulate
major sources of air pollution by power plants throughout the country.
Although the measure would have reduced emissions of nitrogen oxides,
sulfur dioxide, and mercury by 70 percent by 2016, critics charged that
the reductions were less than what would be achieved by enforcing the
existing Clean Air Act. Largely because of disagreements about whether
the Clear Skies Act should regulate emissions of carbon dioxide, a major
greenhouse gas, the measure died in the Senate in 2005. Despite this
setback, the administration soon implemented the Clean Air Interstate
Rule, a regional cap-and-trade system for 28 Eastern states and the
District of Columbia.
After the Supreme Court ruled in April 2007 that greenhouse gas
emissions by automobiles constitute a form of air pollution under the
Clean Air Act, Bush signed energy legislation that imposed increases in
automobile fuel economy standards by the year 2020. In December,
however, the Environmental Protection Agency blocked a proposal by
California and 16 other states to issue regulations that would have
required fuel economies greater than those called for in the new federal
law.
The Bush administration was frequently accused of politically
motivated interference in government scientific research. Critics
charged that political appointees at various agencies, many of whom had
little or no relevant expertise, altered or suppressed scientific
reports that did not promote administration policies, restricted the
ability of government experts to speak publicly on certain scientific
issues, and limited access to scientific information by policy makers
and the public. Numerous complaints by environmental and scientific
groups led to Congressional hearings in 2007 on political interference
in the work of the Surgeon General of the United States and in research
on climate change conducted by the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA). In most cases the administration claimed that the
interventions were an appropriate attempt to ensure scientific
objectivity or simply a benign exercise of the authority of political
appointees.
(From left to right) Laura Bush, U.S. Pres. George W. Bush, and Nancy
Reagan
at the Ronald W. Reagan Presidential Museum, Simi Valley, Calif., Oct.
21, 2005.
Later developments and assessment
2006 elections
The continued lack of progress in the Iraq War, a series of corruption
scandals involving prominent Republican politicians, and the
administration’s poor response to the devastation caused by Hurricane
Katrina in New Orleans and surrounding areas in August 2005 helped the
Democrats win control of both houses of Congress in the midterm
elections of November 2006. The new Congress soon began investigations
of the NSA spying program undertaken in 2002 and of allegedly improper
political influence in the dismissals of several United States attorneys
in December 2006. In the latter investigation the testimony of Alberto
R. Gonzales, Bush’s attorney general since 2005, was viewed with
skepticism by both parties and reinforced the impression that the
Justice Department under his leadership was not sufficiently independent
of the White House. Gonzales resigned in August 2007 and was replaced in
November with Michael Mukasey.
The Plame affair
In March 2007 Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis (“Scooter”) Libby, was
convicted on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in connection
with an investigation into the leak of the identity of a covert CIA
agent in 2003. The agent, Valerie Plame, was the wife of Joseph C.
Wilson, a retired foreign service officer who had traveled to Africa in
early 2002 at the request of the CIA to help determine whether Iraq had
attempted to purchase enriched uranium from Niger. Wilson reported that
there was no evidence of an attempted purchase, and in July 2003 he
publicly speculated that the administration had ignored or distorted
intelligence reports such as his to justify a military invasion of Iraq.
Libby allegedly identified Plame as a CIA agent to journalists to
discredit Wilson by suggesting that his selection for the CIA mission
was the result of nepotism. In testimony before a grand jury and agents
of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Libby falsely claimed that he
had not discussed Plame’s identity with journalists. Bush commuted
Libby’s 30-month prison sentence in July 2007.
During his second term Bush appointed two Supreme Court justices:
John G. Roberts, Jr. (confirmed as chief justice in 2005), and Samuel A.
Alito, Jr. (confirmed in 2006). The appointments increased to four the
number of solidly conservative justices on the nine-member Supreme
Court.
As Bush entered the final year of his presidency in 2008, the country
faced enormous challenges. Although al-Qaeda had been subdued, it had
not been destroyed. The United States and its allies continued to fight
skirmishes with terrorists and their Taliban supporters in Afghanistan,
and the insurgency in Iraq continued to claim U.S. casualties. The
surpluses in the federal budget in 2000 and 2001 were a distant memory,
as the combined effects of military spending, tax cuts, and slow
economic growth produced a series of enormous budget deficits starting
in 2003. Later in 2008 the economy was threatened by a severe credit
crisis, leading Congress to enact a controversial Bush administration
plan to rescue the financial industry with up to $700 billion in
government funds (see Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008).
Despite Bush’s 2000 campaign promise to be “a uniter, not a divider,”
the country remained politically polarized to an extent not seen since
the Vietnam War. While Bush’s critics faulted him for these problems and
many others, his supporters vigorously defended him as a strong leader
who had guided the country through one of the most dangerous periods in
its history.
Encyclopaedia Britannica
