An Obama advisor wrote Tuesday that the Benghazi investigation has helped prompt the administration to “pick up the pace” on executive actions.
Writing in the Huffington Post, White House Senior Advisor Dan Pfeiffer resuscitated a dead horse-phrase that’s been beaten 15,000 times — “it’s the economy, stupid” — to justify the White House’s position against a “Republican Congress” [sic*] that it doesn’t like.
“[W]e have a Republican Congress focused on virtually anything but the middle class — obsessively trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, ginning up politically motivated investigations, and reflexively blocking any proposal that would grow the economy and create jobs,” Pfeiffer opined.
A quick scan of roll call votes finds that the U.S. House has been preoccupied with routine work like legislating budgetary matters and bills to fund the government, and taking aim at the IRS’ targeting of conservative groups — and, yes, establishing a select committee on Benghazi. As it relates to Obamacare, the House did try to reestablish the 40-hour work week for purposes of the law’s employer mandate in early April.
“Given this dynamic, President Obama has only one option — use every ounce of his authority to unilaterally improve economic security,” Pfeiffer wrote.
Specifically, he alluded to House Republicans’ pursuit of “yet another partisan investigation,” stating the administration will instead “be picking up the pace on the executive actions to help the economy.”
He did not specify what actions the White House would take.
In a sign of the fractured relationship between the White House and legislators, House Republicans, themselves, have aggressively touted their efforts to address jobs and the economy in recent weeks. They promoted more than a dozen House-passed jobs bills in a weekly address this month, and also hit the Senate for failing to act on “stacks of bills,” some of which are jobs-related, while the upper chamber focused on an effort to raise the minimum wage.
*The Congress is half-Republican, half-Democrat, with the GOP controlling the House and Democrats controlling the Senate.
