(CNN) – Pre-empting President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday and the GOP response, Republican Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri on Saturday sought to get ahead of the conversation.
The President “has a lot of explaining to do” in his speech, Blunt said in the GOP weekly address, criticizing Obama’s so-called “Year of Action,” a blueprint for 2014 touted by the White House.
As both sides gear up for this year’s midterm elections, Blunt said the President’s focus on income inequality, a likely hallmark of Tuesday’s address, fails to recognize the harm his administration’s economic policies have done on that goal.
“This administration’s agenda to create more government, more spending, more taxes, and more debt has created an inequality crisis of opportunity in our country. Those policies have been disproportionately hurtful to the poorest among us for the past five years,” Blunt said.
Blunt said the President has pitted one faction of America against another.
“We don’t need more class warfare, and we don’t need more interference from Washington. No government program can replace what a good job means for the future of a family,” Blunt said, pivoting to Obama’s sweeping health care initiative, the Affordable Care Act.
The Missourian said Americans are suffering as the White House picks and chooses which parts of the law to follow, pointing to the President’s failure to deliver on a campaign promise that if consumers had an insurance plan they liked before the law took effect, they could keep that plan under the law.
Blunt also hit Obama over the potential for job creation, possible with the approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, which the Obama administration has yet to make a decision on, and the House-approved jobs bills stalled under Democratic leadership in the Senate.
“The President says he has a pen to sign executive orders and a phone to rally support. The Congress should insist that he find the Constitution and follow it.”
