United States

Having admitted in June 2015 that his administration lacked a “complete strategy” to confront ISIL, Obama authorized the deployment of several dozen special-operations troops in Syria in October 2015. That action—which occurred at the same time as growing direct involvement by Russia in the Syrian Civil War—was presented as one component of an evolving strategy that eventually led to talks aimed at effecting a political transition in Syria. In March 2016 Secretary of State Kerry accused ISIL of carrying out a genocide against religious and ethnic minorities in the areas of Syria and Iraq that it controlled and called for an international investigation into atrocities committed by ISIL and punishment for those found to be responsible.

The Merrick Garland nomination and Supreme Court rulings on public unions, affirmative action, and abortion

Also in March 2016, Obama nominated judicial moderate Merrick Garland to take the seat on the Supreme Court vacated by the death of staunch conservative Antonin Scalia. However, Senate Republicans had already vowed not to hold confirmation hearings for any new justice until after the 2016 presidential election. As a result, a trio of important rulings were decided without a full bench. On March 29, in its ruling on the most important labour-law case brought before it in decades, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, the court reached a 4–4 tie that preserved the right of public unions to charge agency fees (charges to nonmembers to cover the cost of collective bargaining and other nonpolitical union activities from which nonmembers benefit). Ruling on Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin on June 23, the court voted 4–3 (with one justice recused) to affirm an appellate court decision that had endorsed the race-conscious admissions policy of the university as consistent with the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. The decision represented an important victory for advocates of affirmative action. Finally, on June 27, 2016, by a 5–3 vote in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the court invalidated two provisions of a 2013 Texas law that had imposed strict requirements on abortion clinics in the state, purportedly in the interest of protecting women’s health. The court ruled that the two provisions placed an “impermissible obstacle” to women seeking an abortion in Texas, in violation of the court’s decision in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992), which had prohibited “substantial obstacle[s] in the path of a woman seeking an abortion before the fetus attains viability,” including “[u]nnecessary health regulations,” as an “undue burden” on the right to abortion.

Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt decisionAbortion rights activists rejoicing in front of the Supreme Court, June 27, 2016, after the court decided in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt to invalidate two provisions of a 2013 Texas law that had imposed strict requirements on abortion clinics in the state.J. Scott Applewhite/AP Images

The Orlando nightclub shooting, the shooting of Dallas police officers, and the shootings in Baton Rouge

Meanwhile, the epidemic of gun violence in the United States persisted. Mass shootings at a community college in Oregon in October 2015 and a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado in November were followed by another in early December at a social services centre in San Bernardino, California, in which a husband and wife with militant Islamist sympathies killed 14 people and injured 22. On June 12, 2016, the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history occurred at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, that was a centre for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) social life. Forty-nine people were killed and 50 others wounded in the attack by a lone gunman.

In July more police shootings and the shooting of police officers took the Orlando event’s place in the headlines. On the evening of July 7, a sniper shot and killed four police officers and a rapid transit officer and wounded several others in downtown Dallas at the close of a peaceful protest against the shootings earlier in the week of African American men by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and suburban Saint Paul, Minnesota. Before being killed by a robot-detonated explosive, the shooter told negotiators that he was upset by recent police shootings. Later in July three law-enforcement officers were shot and killed and three more wounded in Baton Rouge in another retaliatory incident.