President Obama will not scale back his agenda despite the Republican gains in the midterm elections, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough said.
“The president will not trim his sails on that, Chris. He will not,” McDonough said at the end of a spirited back-and-forth with Chris Wallace, host of “Fox News Sunday.”
Wallace noted that President Obama had previously said the midterm elections would be a referendum on his agenda. The host then said the president had not “scale(d) back” his plans or “reach(ed) out to Republicans.”
President Obama, who delivered his annual State of the Union address last week, has “laid out a lot of places in the speech … where we can work with Republicans,” McDonough said, including precision medicine, trade, and research and development.
“But here’s where the president is not going to trim back his agenda, Chris: He is not going to say that we should trim back our agenda working for middle-class families in this country.”
The chief of staff said Republicans — who, after midterm election gains, now both houses of Congress — have been “mired” in debating issues such as last week’s abortion bill controversy.
Likewise, “I don’t see a pathway to getting the DHS appropriations bill” passed, McDonough said, referring to the bill needed to continue funding the Department of Homeland Security, the budget of which has become a target of critics who want to stop Obama’s executive action on immigration.
