Posts Tagged ‘Boehner’

Obama Skips Congress with State of the Union Speech

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Obama's private state of the union address

President Obama, seen in his office delivering a private State of the Union address to a handful of White House staffers, says, “I’ve had it up to here with this separation of powers and checks-and-balances malarkey. Let’s do stuff now.”

(2014-01-27) — Ignoring more than 220 years of tradition, President Obama has, reportedly, already delivered the State of the Union address privately in the Oval Office rather than to a joint session of Congress, where he won’t be appearing Tuesday as scheduled. White House sources say the president told them “we can’t wait” for members of Congress to come together.

“As he has mentioned, President Obama has a pen, so he wrote the speech,” said an unnamed administration source, “and then he stood up from his desk and delivered the stirring address to a handful of White House aides, Secret Service agents and a cleaning crew late Sunday night.”

Under the Constitution, the president is not required to give a speech, but merely to report to Congress from time to time on “the State of Union” and to recommend any measures he thinks appropriate.

“Although the president is naturally reluctant to take a literalist view of the Constitution,” the source said, “in this case, it suits his personal objectives in dealing with this do-nothing Congress. Why bother with all the ceremony and the humiliating prospect of asking them to pass laws, when he can just seize the moment and get stuff done.”

Speaker of the House John Boehner called Obama’s failure to deliver a lengthy speech before the joint session of Congress “highly unusual,” but acknowledged that Obama “just saved me about three nicotine patches.”

Putin Mediates ObamaCare Defunding Standoff

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(2013-09-18) — Russian President Vladimir Putin today stepped in to deescalate tensions between the White House and Republicans in Congress over ObamaCare. At this hour, it’s shaping up to be the Russian statesman’s second diplomatic triumph, just days after he convinced Syria to hand over its chemical weapons to the U.N..

Putin intervened after an Obama administration official, in what was later described as a “gaffe”, said Obama would drop his plans to deploy ObamaCare on the American people if Republican leaders would “abandon their party’s fiscal conservatism,” and back a number of sweeping new spending initiatives, new powers for the NSA, and new “limits on unreasonable freedom of the press.”

“I called Rep. Boehner and Sen. McConnell.” said Putin, “and explained Obama’s offer. They immediately accepted.”

A spokesman for Congressional Republicans denied that GOP leaders had “caved,” and claimed they lost nothing in the deal.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said Putin was able to broker the deal because of the way President Obama “projected strength” by playing golf in the midst of crisis.

Carney noted that while ObamaCare “as we know it” is now legally dead, the offer wasn’t a gaffe, because “we always planned to implement it by executive order and regulatory rulings anyway. We’re still on Plan A.”