Times Minute | State of Union Preview
On the Minute, a look ahead to this evening's State of the Union address -- from President Obama's tone to the expected Republican online response.
WASHINGTON — President Obama plans to declare Tuesday night that he will not wait for Congress to act on reversing the tide of economic disparity, as he uses his annual State of the Union address to outline a list of actions he will take without legislative approval.
In excerpts of the speech released by the White House, Mr. Obama vows to confront growing economic inequality in America, noting that “upward mobility has stalled” and that “too many Americans are working more than ever just to get by.” But as he lays out his agenda for the coming year, he challenged an often balky Congress to get on board or watch him take action on his own.
“I’m eager to work with all of you,” Mr. Obama says in the excerpts of the speech, to be delivered to legislators and a national television audience from the chamber of the House of Representatives starting at 9 p.m. “But America does not stand still — and neither will I. So wherever and whenever I can take steps without legislation to expand opportunity for more Americans families, that’s what I’m going to do.”
As an example of that, aides said Mr. Obama planned to sign an executive order requiring that janitors, construction workers and others working for federal contractors be paid at least $10.10 an hour in the future, using his own power to enact a more limited version of a policy that he has yet to push through Congress.
The order is meant to underscore an increased willingness by the president to act alone if lawmakers continue to resist his agenda, aides said. After a year in which most of his legislative priorities went nowhere, Mr. Obama is seeking ways to make progress despite a lack of cooperation on Capitol Hill.
Republicans planned to fire back by blaming Mr. Obama’s policies for the country’s economic problems, but avoided the language of last year’s government shutdown to present what Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington called “a more hopeful, Republican vision.”
In advance excerpts of her party’s official response, Ms. Rodgers denounced Mr. Obama’s health care program, spending record and regulations. “Too many people are falling further and further behind because, right now, the president’s policies are making people’s lives harder,” she said in the excerpts. “Republicans have plans to close the gap.”
The minimum wage plan provides an example of what he has in mind. Mr. Obama called on Congress during last year’s State of the Union address to raise the minimum wage for workers across the board, only to watch the proposal languish on Capitol Hill, where opponents argued it would hurt businesses and stifle job creation. With prospects for congressional action still slim, Mr. Obama is using the executive order covering federal contractors to go as far as he can on his own.
“You can be sure that the president fully intends to use his executive authority to use the unique powers of the office to make progress on economic opportunity, to make progress in the areas that he believes are so important to further economic growth and further job creation,” Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Monday.
But the minimum wage order will also illustrate the limits of that approach. If Congress increases the federal minimum wage to $10.10 from $7.25 as Mr. Obama has sought, 17 million employees would eventually get a raise unless their jobs were eliminated and another 11 million would benefit indirectly as wage ladders were adjusted, according to estimates by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research organization. Mr. Obama’s order, by contrast, will affect relatively few at first because it will apply only to new or renewed contracts, and even down the road at most it might affect several hundred thousand workers.
White House officials said they hoped that the order would put pressure on Congress to follow through with across-the-board legislation, sponsored by two Democrats, Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa and Representative George Miller of California. And they argued that even without success in Congress, the president’s decision to raise the issue over the last year has helped encourage several states to increase the minimum wage within their borders.
But some of the president’s liberal supporters complained that he did not go far enough and should have applied the wage hike to existing federal contract employees. “This action, while a step forward, suggests he may still be unwilling to take the fighting stance necessary to deliver the big wins over growing inequality that our country desperately needs,” said Jim Dean, chair of Democracy for America, an advocacy group founded by his brother, former Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont.
Similarly, J. David Cox Sr., national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, praised Mr. Obama’s action but said he should apply it to the government’s own employees. “If the president is to have any credibility in talking about living wages, he needs to get his own house in order first and do everything in his power to establish $10.10 as the minimum wage for all federal hourly workers,” Mr. Cox said.
Still, Mr. Obama’s vow to use his executive authority more robustly has drawn criticism from Republicans who say he has already stretched and, in some cases, exceeded the bounds of his power, much as he once accused President George W. Bush of doing.
Among other things, Mr. Obama unilaterally deferred deportation of many younger illegal immigrants after Congress declined to pass legislation giving them legal status. He has delayed enforcement of several aspects of his hotly disputed health care law. He declined to defend against legal challenges the Defense of Marriage Act, a law barring federal recognition of same-sex marriages that was later in part overturned by the Supreme Court.
As he looks ahead to three more years in office, and with Republicans likely to still hold one if not both houses of Congress, Mr. Obama has sought other ways of enacting his agenda. Perhaps the most far-reaching area will be the environment, where the Environmental Protection Agency is working on regulations to limit carbon emissions at the nation’s power plants.
The strategy has angered Republicans. “The president continues to show that he will go to unprecedented lengths to increase the size and reach of the federal government against the will of the American people,” said Scott Pruitt, the attorney general of Oklahoma, said in a statement issued on Monday accompanying a video posted earlier by the Republican Attorneys General Association. “Choosing to circumvent our legislative process and govern through executive power not only violates our constitutional system of checks and balances, but it poses a direct threat to our liberty.”
Republicans argued that if Mr. Obama genuinely wanted to improve the economy, he should find ways to roll back his health care program, approve the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, rally Democrats to support trade negotiating authority and pressure allies in the Senate to take up job-creation bills passed by the Republican House.
“We’ve had a years-long clinic on the failures of liberalism,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said on the Senate floor on Tuesday. “The government stimulus, the taxes, the regulations, the centralization, the government control — it just hasn’t worked.” He said the problem was not the message. “It never has been. It’s the policies themselves.”
Mr. Obama’s speech on Tuesday night will be his fifth formal State of the Union address — his speech to Congress in early 2009 did not technically qualify — and in some ways will be the most challenging. The president, who is reeling in the polls after a year of setbacks, wants to use the moment to re-establish his command of Washington before midterm elections this fall and, after that, the presidential primaries consume public attention.
To reinforce his messages, carefully selected guests will sit with Michelle Obama in the first lady’s box. Among them will be Cristian Avila, a young immigrant spared from deportation by the president’s executive action;Mary T. Barra, the chief executive of General Motors, whose company has rebounded since a federal bailout approved by Mr. Obama; Gov. Steve Beshear of Kentucky, a Democrat who has worked to implement the Obama health care program; and Amanda Shelley, a physician’s assistant from Arizona who received coverage under the health care program on Jan. 1, just a day before needing emergency abdominal surgery.
To counter that, Speaker John A. Boehner has invited the presidents of four businesses from his home state of Ohio who he said are struggling because of Mr. Obama’s health care law: Joe Brown of Hartzell Propeller; Wayne Deschambeau of Wayne HealthCare; Laura Doerger-Roberts of Vinylmax Windows; and David Lippert of Hamilton Caster & Manufacturing. To deliver the response to Mr. Obama, Republicans tapped Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington.
The president’s address, which has been drafted over the last few weeks by Cody Keenan, his chief speechwriter, and other aides, will promote an overhaul of the immigration system and address the president’s concern about the growing income gap between the rich and poor. As part of that, he will renew his call for Congress to pass a minimum-wage increase.
As a prod to lawmakers, Mr. Obama plans to announce his plan to sign the executive order directing federal contractors to pay higher wages. The new rule will apply only to new federal contracts or in cases where contracts are renegotiated with new conditions.
White House officials offered no estimate of how many workers would actually be affected either immediately or as contracts are signed and renegotiated over time. A study by Demos, an organization that seeks to reduce corporate influence in politics, estimated that 560,000 people working for federal contractors make $12 an hour or less.
The president and his supporters argue that the minimum wage has not kept up with the cost of living, and they maintain that an increase is a long-overdue means of reducing disparities. Critics said that the economy was still too fragile to add to the burdens of business owners whose costs would go up along with the minimum wage and therefore might end up cutting jobs.
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