Barack Obama

Barack Obama is an American politician, former Illinois and US senator, and the forty-fourth president of the United States. He served two consecutive terms from 2009–2017; he was first elected in 2008 and reelected in 2012. Obama was the nation's first Black president. Several majorsignificant historical events took place during his presidency, such asincluding the passing of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the killing of Osama bin Laden, the repeal of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, and the nationwide legalization of same-sex marriage.

After graduating high school, Obama enrolled in Occidental College for his first two years of college. He then attended Columbia University as a political science major and graduated in 1983, after which he spent another year in New York as a researcher with Business International Group. Following this, Obama moved to Chicago to work as a community organizer on the South Side. His main priority was to launch the city's church-funded Developing Communities Project. He was also encouraged to organize the residents of Altgeld Gardens to pressure the Chicago city hall to improve public housing conditions. Despite his efforts, he achieved little success, and the experience led him to believe he needed a law degree to succeed in that position. He proceeded to enroll in Harvard Law School, which he attended from 1988 to 1991. He received a juris doctor degree and graduated magna cum laude.

In 1992, Obama was approached to lead Project Vote!, an initiative that promoted voter registration among minority voters in Illinois. He received positive attention for his success in leading the campaign. Several people involved with Project Vote! said it was likely that he could go on to run a successful political campaign. From 1993 to 2004, Obama served as a senior lecturer in law at the University of Chicago Law School. Over the years, he was invited several times to join the school's full-time faculty in a tenured position, but he declined. While he was teaching law, he worked at a small law firm called Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Gallan starting in 1993. He worked there full-time until 1996, when he was elected to the Illinois Senate; he then began working there part-time as a counsel until 2004.

Obama ran for the US Senate in 2004 when Republican Peter Fitzgerald gave up his seat after serving only one term. He won 52 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary and 70 percent of the vote in the general election. During his term in the Senate, he introduced a total of 133 new bills, most of which––119––failed to make it out of committee review. He introduced the Global Poverty Act of 2007 (S. 2433), a bill that would require the president to create a strategy to fight global poverty. He sponsored the Transparency and Integrity in Earmarks Act in 2006 (S. 2261), which would require earmarks attached to bills to be more explicitly detailed. In 2007, he co-sponsored a bill that would increase the child tax credit for low-income and working classworking-class families (S. 218).

Approval of the ACA was heavily divided among party lines. It passed 219–212 in the House of Representatives withwi,th zero Republicans voting in its favor. There were several groups exempt from the mandate, including those with documented hardships, members of exempt religious organizations, Native Americans, undocumented or incarcerated people, and people with incomes below the tax filing threshold. The tax penalty was phased in over the course of three years, beginning in 2014 when the ACA first took effect. In 2016, it reached $695 per individual or 2.5 percent of a household's taxable income, whichever was greater. That amount was then set to be adjusted annually by cost-of-living adjustments.