As you maybe, possibly, have heard, the president of our country this week fired the person who was leading the investigation into collusion between his campaign team and a foreign power seeking to interfere with our democratic process.
Let’s get something straight: FBI Director James Comey deserved to be fired for his absolute mishandling of the Hillary Clinton email matter—not that Trump cares one iota about that—and, at the same time, it was an absolute scandal that Trump fired him now, in a bald-faced attempt to derail the aforementioned investigation just when it was, in the words of an FBI source, “accelerating.”
That was this week. But let's take a trip back to the halcyon days of spring 2013. Barack Obama was fresh off a clear, decisive re-election victory over Mitt Romney, an election in which his party also held the U.S. Senate—remember that the Democrats lost the Senate after only two years of Bill Clinton’s presidency.
With a recalcitrant Republican-dominated House, the prospects for major progressive legislation, however, were quite thin. On health care, among other issues, President Obama had tried to win over Republicans by making substantive policy compromises, and got essentially nothing to show for it. Nevertheless, Obama tried one more time to show just how bipartisan he was. The result was James Comey.