Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., blasted President Obama after he delivered the State of the Union Address Tuesday for “setting a dangerous precedent and eroding the constitutional balance.”
“Last year, the president promised he would use his pen and phone to ignore the legislative branch and push through his agenda by executive fiat,” Gowdy said in a statement Tuesday evening. “We have witnessed one executive power grab after another, setting a dangerous precedent and eroding the constitutional balance set forward by our Fathers.”
As the president himself once said, elections have consequences. The most recent one being he must work with the Republican-controlled Congress, rather than spout recycled, failed ideas from past speeches. Americans are looking for leadership. They want solutions. The president has the opportunity to put aside politics and engage with the new Congress. We hope he will.
Last week, Gowdy gave an impassioned speech on the House floor to nullify Obama’s executive actions on immigration:
This is a fight over whether this branch of government will ever find the courage to stand up for itself. The same document that this and all presidents swears to defend gives this body certain tools, tools like the power of the purse. And it’s about d–-n time we used that tool.
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, Gowdy’s colleague on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, echoed similar sentiments in his release Tuesday.
“If the president’s big government ideas worked, then our problems would have been solved a long time ago. Instead, for the past six years we have piled more and more debt on future generations of Americans with little economic growth to show for it,” Jordan said.
Republicans must lead the way in showing middle class Americans that we are committed to making our government work for them, We need to empower the middle class through fiscally responsible legislation that rewards work, encourages economic growth, repeals the the job-killing Obamacare mandates, and simplifies our unfair tax code.