Will the President Act Without Congress?

On Tuesday evening the President will address the nation constitutionally mandated “State of the Union Address.”  Already we have controversy heading into his televised address.

Sunday, during the morning talk shows, White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer said the president will be offering practical proposals to begin moving the country forward, and, if necessary, will take executive level action to move his agenda when Congress objects.

“If Congress doesn’t act, the president will,” Pfeiffer told Fox News Sunday. 

Pfeiffer has been laying the ground work on what the president will be stating come Tuesday, as 2014 will be “year of action.”  As the president spoke last month, those goals include increasing the minimum wage; extend unemployment benefits, and comprehensive immigration reform.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told ABC’s “This Week” that 2014 will be an “action year” and that the president’s signature health care law is a success — “expanding access to quality and affordable health insurance to millions of Americans and reducing the growth in health care costs.”

Republican Roy Blunt of Missouri stated on Saturday, “If all [Obama] has to offer is more of the same, or if he refuses to acknowledge that his own policies have failed to work, the president is simply doing what many failed leaders have done before him: trying to set one group of Americans against another group of Americans.”

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., told CNN’s “State of the Union” that the White House’s vow to use executive power “sounds vaguely like a threat.”

Both sides continue to stake out political brinksmanship but the real question how will the president respond to raising the debt ceiling which his Treasury Secretary Jack Lew stated Congress needs to raise sooner than anticipated.

The president wants a clean debt ceiling bill, but Speaker of the House John Boehner  spokesman Michael Steel “The Speaker has said that we should not default on our debt, or even get close to it, but a ‘clean’ debt limit increase simply won’t pass in the House,”

“We hope and expect the White House will work with us on a timely, fiscally-responsible solution.”

We will have to wait until Tuesday on how the president responds to Republican demands for some sort of deficit reduction to the increase to raising the debt ceiling.    

 

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