President Barack Obama holds up a pen during a news conference in the East Room of the White House
President Barack Obama and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell promised Americans yesterday they’d search for common ground, then fired the opening salvos of a new battle over immigration.
The usually serious McConnell laughed, cracked smiles and joked as he met with reporters in Louisville, Kentucky, relating an invitation Obama sent for lunch at the White House and pledging an end to partisan gridlock. Yet he said Obama’s plans to take executive action on immigration, if Congress doesn’t act, would amount to “waving a red flag in front of a bull”
Though the Nov. 4 election results shifted control of the Senate from Democrats to Republicans, it did little to change the underlying balance of power in Washington’s divided government, in which each party essentially has had veto power over any major undertaking for four years now.
McConnell joined with House Speaker John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, to outline an agenda that includes items sure to lead to confrontations with Obama. The two lawmakers wrote an opinion article on the Wall Street Journal’s website last night saying they’d work to repeal Obama’s health-care law and revive measures on jobs and the economy that weren’t approved by the Senate under the Democrats’ control.
A subdued Obama said at a White House news conference yesterday that he is “not mopey” about the Republican sweep in the midterm elections. He then brushed aside McConnell’s warning on an immigration order, repeating a promise to take action by the end of the year to halt deportations for some undocumented immigrants if Congress doesn’t move on rewriting the law. “What I’m not going to do is just wait,” he said.
As for Republicans who might be “angered or frustrated,” he added, “those are folks, I just have to say, who are also deeply opposed to immigration reform in any form.”
Obama and McConnell offered words of conciliation without giving ground on their basic political positions. There were no signs of changes to come in party leadership when the next Congress is seated in January and the occupant of the White House remains the same. Richard Rubin, Kathleen Hunter and Mike Dorning , Bloomberg
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