Politico’s Glenn Thrush reports that after President Obama won re-election, he tried to find out ways of pushing his second term agenda without the Republican-led Congress:
“Guys, I don’t want politics to be a limit of what you recommend to me,” Obama told senior aides David Plouffe, Lew, Dan Pfeiffer and Pete Rouse a couple of weeks after his reelection, according to a White House aide with direct knowledge of the meeting.
“Let’s come up with an agenda, then let’s figure it out from there as best we can,” he said, prodding them to adopt a more muscular approach to the use of executive power. “We can’t let the driving force of what we pass be Congress.”