On Tuesday’s “Hannity” on the Fox News Channel, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) laid out his strategies to take on the executive branch’s alleged overreach under the leadership of President Barack Obama.
First, Ryan explained the game plan for repealing ObamaCare and defunding Planned Parenthood.
“We’ve been at this for what, five years now?” Ryan said. “We’ve finally found the smart strategy to be able to get a bill on [Obama’s] desk. We’ve never been able to get around a filibuster in the Senate to get a bill to repeal ObamaCare. By the way, this also defunds Planned Parenthood, which is a very high priority of ours. We could never get through the Senate filibuster, so we used the one rule, the one tool we have a year – we call this reconciliation, so we can get around the Senate filibuster to get a bill on his desk defunding ObamaCare and Planned Parenthood. We’re passing that tomorrow. I fully anticipate the president will veto this. I mean, how many times have we’ve been saying we want to put bills on his desk saying who we are, what he believes and he will veto. We will have a veto override vote on the later in the month. But this is the first time we’ve been able to get on his desk a bill going after ObamaCare and Planned Parenthood.”
Ryan touted his leadership and how things would be done differently under his speakership as well as Congress’ efforts to take on the executive branch through the court system. But he also emphasized the importance of winning the presidential election this year.
“I’ve been a frustrated conservative as well,” he said. “Number one, I’m hitting the reset button. We’re going to do things differently around here in the House. Number two, I’m decentralizing power so every conservative, every member of Congress has a greater ability to participate in the process so we can have this place work the way the founders intended it to work. But number three, we have to use every tool at our disposal to keep this executive branch honest, to keep oversight over them. So let’s take this executive amnesty – we went the court route and we’ve been successful. We’re going after the president in court on ObamaCare issues as well. We’ve succeeded there. We’re using the power of the purse with riders on a whole host of things – pro-life riders, Internal Revenue Service riders, EPA riders and at the end of the day, Sean, what really matters is winning an election. We have to have a conservative in the White House.”
“We have to have a conservative in the White House that isn’t trashing the Constitution, that isn’t going with the phone and the pen routine and that is why – and the reason I took this job and my colleagues know this is we have to go on offense in 2016 and we have to offer a bold agenda to the country so that the people of this country who do not like the direction America is heading, which we don’t that we owe them an alternative,” Ryan added. “We have to give them a bold conservative agenda so that the men and women of this country can decide which way the country goes in 2016. We want a mandate election. If we win that election, then we have the mandate, then we have the wherewithal, then we have the Republican president, the Republican Congress with a conservative agenda to put in place in 2017. That is why I’m doing this job in the first place.”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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