Obamapresidesoverunravelingofhispredecessors’foreign

Obama presides over unraveling of his predecessors’ foreign policy accomplishments

posted at 12:41 pm on August 12, 2014 by Noah Rothman

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President Barack Obama entered office in 2009 with an undeniable mandate to bring about a swift but favorable conclusion to the Iraq War. But by the time the president entered office, combat operations in Iraq were already winding down.

By the middle of 2008, the “surge” strategy and a political offensive resulting in the “Anbar Awakening” had greatly reduced internecine violence. Iraq was on a path toward reconciliation and, it was hoped, stability and peace.

“The surge had undoubtedly met its stated aim of buying the time and space necessary for the Iraqi government to advance national reconciliation and, at least in theory, develop the capacity to provide adequate public services,” a 2011 article in Foreign Affairs magazine by reporter Emma Sky read.

As I prepared to depart Iraq in August 2010, it was clear that the close partnership between the U.S. military and the ISF had paid dividends. Accompanying [Gen. Raymond] Odierno as he toured the country to review the progress, I witnessed U.S. and ISF soldiers celebrating each time the United States transferred one of its bases to Iraqi forces, conducting ceremonies in which U.S. commanders symbolically delivered the keys to their Iraqi counterparts. The strong individual and institutional relationships between the two forces contributed to a growing sense of security across the country.

That is not to say that the insurgency in Iraq had been entirely put down by 2009, or that the Bush administration bequeathed Obama an Iraq that was politically stable. The president had his work cut out for him in Iraq, but even those predisposed to be skeptical of the idea that Iraq could ever become a model state were forced to concede gains had been made.

By the summer of 2010, The New York Times, which long ago allowed the tone of the editorial page to color its supposedly neutral coverage of the Iraq War, was quoting even Iraq War skeptics who sounded notes of optimism. Framed as an iconoclastic voice of skepticism within the military establishment, Col. Alan Baldwin, a former Marine intelligence officer who warned before the invasion of Iraq that the United States would likely set off a civil war, marveled at America’s perseverance in pursuit of a stable Iraq.

“We opened a Pandora’s box,” Baldwin told Times reporter Peter Baker. “Lots of bad things were flying out of there. But good things are there now too. It’s amazing we had the patience to be where we are today.”

It was not America’s patience, but the patience of its political establishment that deserved the credit. The American public would have long ago abandoned Iraq to its own murderous devices had the political will existed in Washington to invite that kind of calamity. Sobriety and foresight guided Washington’s approach to the situation in Iraq, but only just long enough to provide Obama with the space he needed to desert Iraq entirely.

Today, that country is a failed state. The Islamic State militants who swept across the border from Syria occupy one third of the nation, a government in turmoil in the midst of an effort to oust a divisive prime minister controls another third, and the Kurdish proto-state governs the remainder. This condition was all but unthinkable when the last American troops boarded the final C-130 out of Iraq.

Iraq is not the first of Obama’s predecessors’ foreign policy accomplishments which he has undone.

When Richard Nixon took office in 1969, the geopolitical landscape in East Asia presented not merely challenges but opportunities as well. The Sino-Soviet split evolved in the later part of that decade from an ideological dispute between Beijing and Moscow into a military challenge. In March of 1969, a series of border skirmishes between the Red and People’s Liberation Armies resulted in heavy casualties. By October of that year, the two Communist poles were on the brink of war.

It was a master stroke for the Nixon administration to leverage this split in the Communist world to the United States’ advantage. The “opening” of China, culminating in Nixon’s 1972 visit to Beijing, put the Soviets on the defensive and made Nixon into a national hero. Just imagine what it would take today for two chambers of Congress controlled by Democrats offer a sitting Republican president a standing ovation in the summer of a presidential election year. U.S. intervention into the Sino-Soviet clash, and it was an intervention albeit a diplomatic one, froze that conflict in place until the collapse of the USSR in 1991.

The Russian Federation normalized relations with China and it was under Obama’s predecessor that the two countries again embarked on a path of military cooperation (what have now become regular joint military exercises between the two powers were first held in 2005 and 2007). It was, however, Obama’s presidency which saw this relationship evolve from a cooperative alliance of convenience into an anti-American bloc aimed at overturning the geopolitical status quo.

Russia, a revanchist power which aims to restore some measure of its Soviet-era regional hegemony, has been able to rely on China to offset any of the repercussions the West has imposed as a result of Moscow’s invasion and annexation of parts of Ukraine.

A bilateral energy deal which Russia and China signed in June has been described as a “geopolitical tectonic shift.” Similarly, China has offered to help replace many of the imported Western food products that have been banned as the result of a volley of tit-for-tat sanctions. “Some believe that a China-Russia axis is now emerging and could eventually propose an alternative towards a multi-polar world order,” Al Jazeera reported in June.

This was not the only accomplishment of the Nixon administration that Obama unraveled. Just over 40 years ago, the Soviet client state of Egypt threw out the Russian military advisors which had supported that country since Gamal Nasser. The Nixon administration cemented Egypt’s new fealty to the United States when it mediated an end to the 1973 Yom Kippur War in a fashion that did not humiliate Cairo. Nixon’s successor, Jimmy Carter, and his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, solidified the relationship between the U.S. and the Egyptian army during the Camp David Accord negotiations.

The Arab Spring upended all of that when the Egyptian military lost control of the government to the Muslim Brotherhood. In what the U.S. reluctantly deemed a coup, the military reasserted control over the state when they overthrew the deeply unpopular Mohamed Morsi in the summer of 2013. Bilateral relations with Egypt were severely damaged when the Obama administration cut off some aid to Cairo as a result of this putsch.

“Since then the U.S. has done little to mend fences with the military and demonstrated little understanding of the fact that Egypt had become a zero-sum game in which the only choices were the Brotherhood or the military,” Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin wrote in December. “With the administration announcing a partial aid cutoff to the new government, what followed next was entirely predictable. Cairo turned to Moscow for help and for the first time since 1973 Russia has a foothold in the Arab world’s most populous nation as well as the one that, with the Suez Canal, holds its most strategic position.”

On Tuesday, the Russian news source RIA Novosti announced triumphantly that Russia had finally reversed the embarrassment meted out by Anwar Sadat, and there would again be military cooperation between these two states. Russian President Vladimir Putin also revealed that the two countries are investigating the potential to create a free trade zone.

These are just a few of the most egregious examples of how the Obama administration has squandered the legacy achievements of his predecessors. With more than two years of the Obama presidency to go, he may secure for himself even more dubious accomplishments.

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Tags: Barack Obama, China, Egypt, George W. Bush, Iraq, Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, Russia

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SlimmajoritybelieveWatergatewasaseriousmatter,

Slim majority believe Watergate was a serious matter, according to CNN poll

posted at 12:01 pm on August 8, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

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Well, this explains a few things about our current politics – or maybe politics in general. Tomorrow will mark the fortieth anniversary of the only presidential resignation in American history, when Richard Nixon stepped down rather than face impeachment and removal over the abuses of power uncovered in the Watergate scandal. Back then, those abuses shocked the nation, especially after the White House tapes showed Nixon himself deeply involved in them. These days, nearly half of all Americans think of it as business as usual:

Forty-six percent of people believe the events leading up to the resignation of President Nixon were “just politics,” according to a new poll that coincides with the 40th anniversary of his stepping down.

The CNN poll found a narrow majority, 51 percent, believe the Watergate scandal was a serious matter, while slightly less describe it as the kind of thing in which both parties engage.

Or maybe that’s business as usual:

Those numbers have been relatively constant over the last three decades. When the question was asked in 1982 — eight years after Nixon resigned — 52 percent said it was a very serious matter, while 45 percent described it as just politics.

That’s been a remarkably stable outcome, actually, over the last 32 years of polling on the question. The results have ranged from 52/44 to 49/46, within the margins of error. The most recent result was in 2002 on the 30th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, and it was 51/42.

One common thought about the legacy of Watergate was the erosion of trust in the institutions of self-governance, but the trend lines in polling show that erosion started well before Watergate. It seems almost quaint now, but in 1958, 73% of people trusted government in Washington all (16%) or most (57%) of the time. Even as late as 1966, 65% said the same thing (17/48), but by 1968 (61%, 7/54) that began to shift, thanks most likely to the Vietnam War. By 1972, when the break-in took place but before it became a national scandal, trust had dropped to 53% (5/48), and then dropped sharply again in 1974 (36%, 2/34), with sustained majorities in the “some” category ever since. The only exception to that came four weeks after 9/11, when trust in government surged ever so briefly (60%, 13/47).

Today? It’s 13% (1/12) with 76% saying “some” and 10% “never,” the first time in the series that “never” has reached double digits. Just before Barack Obama took office, the trust figure was 25% (3/22). Big business gets slightly more trust than Washington at 17% (1/16), but it’s within the MOE of the government figure.

The demographics on the Watergate question are remarkable for their consistency. Republicans (51%) and Democrats (58%) both tend to think of it as a serious matter, but a slim majority of independents (51%) say it was politics as usual. Younger voters also tend to dismiss it (44/52), while all other age demos fall in line with the overall results.

Count me in with those who consider it a serious matter — and an unlearned lesson, as I wrote yesterday:

The familiarity of these events, coupled with the increasing impulse of Obama to abandon constitutional limits, shows that America largely ignored the lessons of Watergate. It’s not enough to be wary of executive power when the opposition party controls the White House, as Republicans belatedly learned in 1974; to defend and protect constitutional government and the rule of law, that vigilance has to exist at all times.

Some of the same voices that shrieked with horror at the threat of the “unitary executive” under George W. Bush seem perfectly comfortable now with Obama ruling by executive fiat rather than governing under the rule of law, as long as it’s only their bêtes noires that get targeted.

Maybe it is business as usual after all.

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Tags: Barack Obama, CNN, polls, Richard Nixon, trust, Watergate

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Theexecutive“nuclearoption”andmissingthepoint

The executive “nuclear option” and missing the point of Watergate

posted at 12:01 pm on August 7, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

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The two concepts in the headline may sound disconnected, but they aren’t — and the fact that the connection may not be readily apparent speaks to the lessons unlearned from one of America’s most potent political crises. Ron Fournier sympathizes with the difficulties Barack Obama faces on immigration policy, and even with Obama’s policy goals. However, Fournier warns that the ends do not justify the means of trampling over the separation of powers and the rule of law:

Would it be wrong to end-run Congress? Another way to put it might be, “Would more polarization in Washington and throughout the country be wrong?” How about exponentially more polarization, gridlock, and incivility? If the president goes too far, he owns that disaster. …

Regardless of the justification, acting alone denies Obama a full view of the problem and, with no marriage of ideas, he almost certainly exacerbates the “dangerous impasse” that Brownstein labeled a civil war.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat argues that this isn’t merely a case of a president responding to a do-nothing Congress. “It’s limited caesarism as a calculated strategy, intended to both divide the opposition and lay the groundwork for more aggressive unilateralism down the road.” If you don’t buy any other argument, consider this one: Endowing the presidency with extraordinary power would be an extremely short-sighted and selfish move.

Indeed — and it’s not as if we don’t already know the dangers of that. By an interesting coincidence, Saturday will be the 40th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation, which he tendered when it became obvious that he would be impeached for his abuses of power. In my column for The Fiscal Times, I argue that the real lesson from the scandal was the reminder of the value of limitation on executive power and the rule of law. The rise of “caesarism,” which I also quote from Douthat, shows that we have not learned that lesson at all and still love executive power …. when exercised on behalf of our own hobby horses:

It took both of the other branches, and more than two years of political strife in part during an unpopular war, to bring a rogue President to heel and reinforce the rule of law. If any lesson should have been learned from this, the value and necessity of restricting executive authority and enforcing constitutional restraints should have been at the top of the list. These days, though, we seem to cheer rogue executives for defying those restrictions as an antidote for political stalemate rather than recognize the danger of unchecked power. 

Consider the current debate over unilateral executive action on immigration, tax law, and other issues. Obama supporters argue that the current state of politics on Capitol Hill leaves Barack Obama little choice but to start issuing orders for widespread deferrals on enforcement of immigration law. Others don’t see it that way.

The New York Times’ Ross Douthat called it “Caesarism,” but most call it an abuse of presidential authority. In our constitutional system, Congress passes laws and the executive branch enforces them.  Even in agency law, where those powers are shared to a certain degree, the executive cannot exceed the grant of authority from Congress, as the Supreme Court just reminded the EPA in June. A stalemated Congress “doesn’t grant the President license to tear up the Constitution,” The Washington Post editorial board warned this week.

Taxes are another area in which Obama supporters are urging “Caesarism,” and sometimes worse. The byzantine and burdensome US corporate tax system has prompted a wave of “inversions,” where corporations relocate overseas in acquisitions and mergers to avoid paying taxes in America. Obama began warning that this violated his sense of “economic patriotism,” saying, “I don’t care if it’s legal” – which is exactly what the executive in the constitutional model should care about.

Instead, to much cheering, the administration has begun mulling changes to tax laws they can impose unilaterally to punish corporations for acting in a legal manner in reaction to legitimate cost concerns. What happened to taxation with representation?

Our political system is steadily moving in the direction of strongman rule, rather than the compromise model that constitutional governance and the rule of law requires. We had better all stop cheering that when our own party controls the executive and start demanding adherence to the constitutional model of separate and co-equal branches. Otherwise, we ran Nixon out of office for no good reason at all, if the ends justifies the means for the President. “I don’t care if it’s legal” is just the flip side of “If the President does it, it’s not illegal.”

Update: Fred Bauer slammed Obama for campaigning against the supposed abuses of his predecessor while attempting on every front to expand his own executive authority:

In a 2006 report on the use of signing statements in the Bush administration, a committee appointed by the American Bar Association found that “executive power as conceived in Great Britain and America excluded a power to dispense with or suspend execution of the laws for any reason.” This report also noted that King James II was rebuked by the English Bill of Rights in 1689 for “assuming and exercising a power of dispensing with and suspending of laws and the execution of laws without consent of Parliament.”

At least two points might be gleaned from this report. The first is that, by and large, the Founders drew from a broader tradition in which the executive was not the legislator of last resort, empowered to act where the legislature had refused to and to overrule existing laws at a whim. Instead, each of the three institutionalized branches of the federal government (the presidency, Congress, and the judiciary) have certain, limited responsibilities and powers. Indeed, viewing the executive branch as the legislator of last resort turns the legacy of the Founders on its head: By instituting a multi-step process of legislation (through having a bicameral legislature and giving the executive the authority to veto laws), the Founders made it difficult to pass new laws. This difficulty has often encouraged consensus in the passing of laws and open debate in the examination of them. The difficulty of passing laws is woven into the fabric of the federal government, and so, if we gave the president the legislative authority to act on all issues where Congress has not done so, we would risk supplanting the traditional notion of the balanced republic with an executive-driven state in which Congress is a superfluous organ capable of dispensing political patronage and issuing press releases but not actually governing.

The second point is that, during the Bush presidency, Democratic politicians and others on the Left were aware of (or at least publicly professed a belief in) the limits of executive power. One of the members of the ABA task force behind the 2006 report was Harold Koh, who served in the Obama administration from 2009 to 2013. Many Democrats (and not only Democrats) complained about George W. Bush’s use of executive authority, criticizing his appending of signing statements to bills he signed into law and his use of executive orders. In remarks at the Georgetown University Law Center at the end of 2006, the incoming chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.) attacked the Bush administration for exhibiting a “corrosive unilateralism” in its dealings with Congress.

One need not agree with the particular judgments of various prominent Democrats vis-à-vis the Bush administration in order to find merit in some of the general principles to which they appealed. For instance, in remarks on the Senate floor in September 2008, Leahy’s fellow Vermonter Senator Bernie Sanders (I.) assailed the presidential psychology that went “I don’t have to worry about separation of powers. I don’t have to worry about the laws of the land. I don’t have to worry about the Constitution. I am the President. In my judgment, I can do what I want.” Instead, Sanders asserted that there were limits on executive authority — that the president could not write legislation for himself. In remarks about Independence Day in 2008, West Virginia senator Robert C. Byrd argued that the Founders “design[ed] a government that limits the power of the executive in order to prevent tyranny by one man.” Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin spoke many times about the need to protect congressional territory from encroachment by the executive. While the president does have considerable powers (especially in his capacity as commander-in-chief), there are limits to these powers.

Throughout the Bush administration, Democrats argued that the president did not have the authority to rewrite or dispense with the laws. These arguments provide a backdrop for the debates taking place in the inner circles of the Obama administration, far from the light of day, about what potential executive orders to issue.

Be sure to read it all.

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Tags: Barack Obama, Constitution, executive action, immigration, Richard Nixon, separation of powers, taxes, Watergate

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Say, the Obama White House is looking particularly Nixonian these days, huh?

Say,theObamaWhiteHouseislookingparticularly

ObamatosoundNixonianthemeinSOTU?

Obama to sound Nixonian theme in SOTU?

posted at 12:01 pm on January 27, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

Barack Obama plans to launch a call to action in tomorrow’s State of the Union address as a way to scold a recalcitrant House for blocking his agenda. The White House will emphasize executive action in 2014 rather than work with Congress, making the venue for the SOTU a little odd indeed. We’ll get back to that in a moment, but the White House might want to rethink their approach, because as it turns out, it’s not exactly new — and they may not appreciate the comparison, National Journal’s George Condon explains:

But, as Obama has learned, “new” doesn’t always mean new. Presidents—sometimes without even realizing it—borrow phrases and ideas from their predecessors. Expect to hear this president use his speech this year to push Congress to make 2014 “a year of action.” It’s a phrase he previewed earlier this month. But there is nothing new here. It is borrowed. Credit Nixon for this one. In his State of the Union in 1972, he complained that Congress had ignored his legislative agenda over the past 12 months. That, he said, had been “a year of consideration.” But, he added, “Now, let us join in making 1972 a year of action on them, action by the Congress, for the nation, and for the people of America.”

Presidents are “always looking for a simple, easy-to-remember message on top of all their policy proposals,” said William Galston, Clinton’s chief domestic policy adviser. “Something that not only gives some rhetorical lift but gives the people listening to the speech the impression that it all ties together, that all these specific ideas are in pursuit of a common goal or a common vision.” Galston added, “Underlying that is the message of leadership—’Hey, I know what I am doing. I am here for a purpose. I’m a clear-eyed, goal-oriented, mission-oriented leader.’ And a good slogan can convey all of that.”

That has given us Clinton’s New Covenant, Nixon’s New Federalism, and Carter’s New Foundation, all terms unveiled in a State of the Union address. Carter’s was perhaps the most unfortunate in 1979. He used the term five times and the word “foundation” 13 times. But only three days later—after much mocking that a “new foundation” had something to do with women’s undergarments—Carter cast the campaign aside, telling reporters, “I doubt it will survive. We are not trying to establish this as a permanent slogan. It was the theme that was established … for one State of the Union speech.” Forget that the White House had, indeed, been selling it as a permanent slogan.

Remember Obama’s slogan from the 2011 State of the Union, “Win the Future“? No one at the White House apparently figured out that “WTF” has a whole different meaning to people in the social-media era, and eventually dropped it. However, Condon reminds us that “Win the Future” was actually a replacement for the recycled “New Foundation” in his first inaugural address. This White House is not long on research or originality, it seems.

Also at National Journal, Ron Fournier writes that the problem of the Obama presidency isn’t Congress, John Boehner, or anyone else but the President himself. He cites two recent profiles of the White House and its new focus on executive action, which Obama’s defenders derided last year when critics attempted to hold Obama accountable for a bad economy and other failures:

The assessment concluded that Obama and his communications team allowed his fifth year to be judged too much by his dealings with Congress, which were poor.

A conservative Republican faction killed his gun-control proposals— joined by some Democratic senators — and eventually shut down the government for 16 days. “We still didn’t know enough about the Republicans,” said one senior administration official, who like others interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the internal assessments.

Didn’t know enough? After five years in office? This official, like so many others in the West Wing, apparently is not sufficiently self-aware to realize that he confirmed an Obama critique – that the president is too removed and disinterested from the political process to affect it, that he doesn’t value congressional relations enough to give them anything more than lip service, and that, for his enormous intellectual gifts, Obama is handicapped by a lack of political curiosity. He chose not to know enough about the Republicans.

The story raises several other questions. First, why did it take this long for the White House to discover the power of executive orders and rule-making? (Republicans are warning of “tyrannical executive orders,” ignoring the fact that GOP presidents issue them, too.) For instance, Obama has refused to use the power of clemency in a broad way to correct injustice in crack-cocaine sentencing. He punted to Congress the most important questions about NSA overreach rather than taking executive action. And now we’re supposed to be impressed by his pen and phone?

He quotes John Dickerson at Slate, who is unimpressed by Obama’s attempt to wrap himself up in his limitations “like a shawl”:

The president’s comments reflect the triumph of experience over hope. He long ago tempered his claims about transforming partisan politics—he now seems a little embarrassed about the whole thing. But the tone of the piece also shows how realistic he has become about harnessing the power of his electoral success and the national mood he claimed it represented. That was a promise of the Obama presidency that didn’t rely on a willing Congress. He had a special relationship with voters and he was going to turn it into a force. He called on that bond in his second inaugural address: “You and I, as citizens, have the power to set this country’s course. You and I, as citizens, have the obligation to shape the debates of our time—not only with the votes we cast, but with the voices we lift in defense of our most ancient values and enduring ideals.”

But when he talks about tackling income inequality he no longer speaks of national movements. It’s not because the public isn’t ready to be led. The country is still looking for a political champion to rally them, but unlike a previous version of Obama who would have promised that he could channel the passion outside Washington to change Washington, his aspirations are more modest now. He hopes to give “voice to an impression, I think a lot of Americans have, which is it’s harder to make it now if you are just the average citizen who’s willing to work hard and has good values, and wasn’t born with huge advantages or having enjoyed extraordinary luck—that the ground is less secure under your feet.” After six years the president recognizes that people are looking for “other flavors … somebody else out there who can give me that spark of inspiration or excitement.”

Here’s part of the problem: Inequality is getting worse, not better, under Obama. The workforce participation rate has hit a 36-year low despite nearly five years of technical recovery, and food stamps are going to an all-time high of American families by percentage. Numerous pivots to the economy — and this one — have done nothing to arrest that trend in Obamanomics. Plus, the disastrous impact of ObamaCare shows what this administration’s ideas on solving income inequality will do across the entire economy, not just the one-sixth of it which the health-care sector comprises.

Fournier’s piece touched off a fun Twitter debate with Greg Sargent of the Washington Post over the nature of “Green Lanternism.”

@ron_fournier there is no contradiction here whatsoever. None. We argued 1) O can't move Cong; and 2) therefore he should use exec auth

— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) January 27, 2014

@ThePlumLineGS and yet you want him to move congress on immigration, minimum wage, farm bill … Point is, he needs to use all tools.

— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) January 27, 2014

@ThePlumLineGS I've been arguing for a year now that White Flag caucus undervalues Obama with GL meme. Story reflects the meme accurately.

— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) January 27, 2014

@ThePlumLineGS Respectfully feel the same about condescending Green Lanternist meme

— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) January 27, 2014

Barack Obama warned earlier that while Congress can hold up legislation, he still has a phone and a pen. Jill Lawrence explains at the Daily Beast that neither will really mean much except some small-scale efforts on the agenda Obama will roll out tomorrow:

President Obama says he’s going to focus for the rest of his tenure on what he calls “the defining challenge of our time”—a cluster of issues including income inequality, stalled upward mobility, long-term unemployment, and wage stagnation. It’s an admirable pledge and, 50 years after Lyndon Johnson urged Congress to declare war on poverty and unemployment, a timely one. But even if his attention doesn’t wander, the odds of Obama having significant impact are long. In contrast to other issues, like the environment and even gun control, presidents armed with nothing but executive powers can’t do much to affect the economy. They need Congress to act—and how often does that happen these days?

The cupboard isn’t entirely bare as Obama looks for ways to increase jobs and decrease inequality on his own. But no one should mistake a marginal nudge with a substantial achievement. Consider that in September 2011, in his American Jobs Act, Obama proposed spending $50 billion on job-generating infrastructure projects, and creating a National Infrastructure Bank capitalized with $10 billion. The plan went nowhere thanks to Senate Republicans who blocked it, and Obama eventually fell back on executive action on a much smaller scale—speeding up the federal review and permit process for major infrastructure projects. But he’s still hoping for real money and went on the road last summer to beg Congress to step up.

Actually, the House has stepped up — a number of times. It has passed numerous jobs-related bills that the Senate has refused to consider. Perhaps Obama could get on his phone and ask Harry Reid to allow debate and a vote on those packages, or perhaps facilitate negotiations to craft a compromise between his plan and those of House Republicans.

Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, economy, executive power, Jimmy Carter, jobs, Richard Nixon, sotu

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