New day, same old story.
President Barack Obama continued to defend his recent slew of executive orders in a Wednesday interview with Marketplace, public radio’s program on business and the economy.
During the interview, Kai Ryssdal, the host and senior editor of Marketplace, asked Obama about his mantra of “pen and phone” governing this year.
“Is that where we are now? That it’s one guy with a pen in this town, who is running the American economy?” Ryssdal asked.
Without skipping a beat, Obama launched into an attack on House Republicans and blamed them for his overreach.
“Well, unfortunately, we have a Congress that’s broken down. And I know that a lot of times people who are watching what’s happening in Washington sort of feel like, ‘You know, a plague on both their houses. Democrats, Republicans, they’re all the same. None of them care about us.’ But the truth is that we have a very specific problem. We have a House of Representatives that is so ideologically driven at this point that they are not able to carry out basic functions of government,” Obama said.
“So we saw this during the government shutdown. The idea that we would shut down the government based on a notion that we’ve got to drastically cut the basic safety net — despite the fact that the deficit has come down by more than half during my presidency — is not based on common sense, it’s not based on any sound economic theories. It’s based on the ideological predispositions of a handful of folks who are currently calling the shots in the House of Representatives,” he continued. “The same is true, we just recently saw, with immigration reform; we have bipartisan support for immigration reform. We know that the economy would grow faster, that we would end up seeing $1.4 trillion in additional growth in the United States if in fact we passed immigration reform. We know that there are companies across the country, particularly in the high-tech sector, that are begging to have highly skilled immigrants — who we’ve trained, we’ve paid for and are now going back to their home countries to start businesses — stay here in the United States. Despite all that, we still couldn’t get the House of Representatives to act, primarily because of politics, primarily because they’re captive of a small ideological band inside their caucus.”
Obama, aren’t you tired of the blame game by now?
The full transcript of the Marketplace interview can be found here.
