“Obstruction,” “abuse,” “harmful” — Obama used them all to describe what Republicans in the Senate have been doing by filibustering his nominees. But his takeaway was even simpler: it’s just wrong.
“It’s not what our Founders envisioned,” he said. “A deliberate and determined effort to obstruct everything, no matter what the merits, just to refight the results of an election is not normal.”
To opponents, Obama endorsed a power grab that overturns nearly a century of tradition. There are people who’ve worried about his dreams of an imperial government from the day he launched his presidential campaign in Springfield, but there’s no winning those people for Obama.
The president needed to win back the people who used to see him as the embodiment of rational competence, and whose support has been dying the death of a hundred thousand Error 404 messages. He didn’t discuss the Affordable Care Act, a website, a broken promise of people being able to keep their coverage. He barely mentioned the judicial nominees whose failure to get confirmed were the immediate cause of the showdown.
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