With President Obama heading out of office soon Virginia Republicans fear he’s preparing a slew of executive orders that could hurt the economy in the Commonwealth.
President Obama has already issued executive orders on everything from gun control to immigration. Some have been upheld by the courts, while others have been struck down. But court cases take years, and that has Republicans like Virginia Republican Morgan Griffith worried that Obama is going to use his pen on the way out of office.
“It fits with his modus operandi and I believe he will attempt to authorize all kinds of rules and regulations on his way out the door.”
Griffith is especially worried that the administration is going to try to go around Congress and give insurance companies who lost money from setting up Obamacare exchanges billions of dollars to keep them solvent.
“Frankly it’s a bailout and they’re going to use our cash to do it with and Congress has said not to that.”
But Democrats don’t view Obama’s executive actions as over reach. Northern Virginia Democrat Gerry Connolly says the GOP has made much ado about nothing when it comes to Obama’s push for tighter rules and regulations.
“So with all the so-called regulations of the Obama years have we created 14 million new jobs net or not? The biggest, longest, net positive job growth in American history – I thought it was job killing?”
That said, Connolly says the president shouldn’t use his executive pen as if it’s a scepter.
“I would hope that all new rules and regulations are based on years of study and justification. The timing is less important to me than the preparation. If it’s just being sprung on us with no known preparation or justification, I think that is a problem.”
Virginia Democrat Don Beyer argues the president has had to go around Congress because the Tea Party has ground the Capitol to a halt.
“A lot of it is because we can’t get anything done in the House because of the Freedom Caucus and neither the Senate nor the House are good at talking to each other, so you’ve got a president who says ‘if the legislative branch isn’t functioning very well, I don’t want to do nothing, so I’ll use the executive powers of the presidency to move forward with this agenda.”
But Virginia Republican Scott Rigell argues the president should have reached out to Congress – not just gone around them.
“There is a great deal of frustration with a lot of Republicans, myself included, that the president should have fought harder for common ground, perhaps we should have as well at different times, but the solution is not to just issue a slew of regulations.”
Rigell says Republican presidents have also shared some of the blame over the years.
“The separation of powers and the usurpation – the taking of power from the legislative branch and over into the executive branch through executive orders and hyper regulation – is, I think, truly harming our country and our overall system of governance.”
That said, congress doesn’t have many options when it comes to overturning last minute executive actions, which is a part of Republicans pitch to put their party back in the White House.
