Mr. Obama is continuing to fill the ranks of the government with his own appointees; since Election Day, he has named 103 people to senior Civil Service jobs, boards, key commissions and oversight panels, including the National Council on Disability, the Amtrak board of directors, the Holocaust Memorial Council and the boards of visitors at military academies.
He is also pushing ahead with his goal of freeing nonviolent drug offenders from federal prisons. In the last few weeks, he has commuted the sentences of 232 federal inmates and pardoned 78 others. And on Wednesday, he will meet with Democratic lawmakers to discuss ways to protect the Affordable Care Act from efforts by Mr. Trump and Republicans to dismantle it.
To many conservatives, Mr. Obama is acting out of spite as much as conviction. “He’s doing all this stuff as his legacy,” said Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, comparing Mr. Obama to a petulant god in a Wagner opera. “If he goes through three more weeks of this stuff, who is the country going to think is the extremist? Trump or Obama?”
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