Strap Yourselves in for 2016

Because it's gonna be a wild ride, if President Obama has anything to say about it. And he does!

President Obama will roll out a bold set of executive actions during his final year in office, his top adviser said Wednesday.

"We'll do audacious executive action throughout the course of the rest of the year, I am confident of that," White House chief of staff Denis McDonough told reporters at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast.

The comments are a clear sign the president will continue his go-it-alone approach, which has angered Republicans in Congress.

...[T]he White House is signaling the president won't be afraid to take risks to check off pieces of unfinished business with just 12 months left in office.

Obama recently told his staff he's going to demand that everything they do in 2016 be "infused with the sense of possibility that has both undergirded this administration, but also this country," the chief of staff said.

The president also said, "I am going to be asking myself, 'why not?'" according to McDonough.

I have very mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, Republican obstructionism has reached absurd proportions; they're not providing checks and balances to the President's agenda, but creating impenetrable gridlock.

The opposition party isn't meant to hold the country hostage if the sitting administration is proposing reasonable legislation with wide support with which they just happen to disagree.

So I don't know what else the President is supposed to do, when they flatly refuse to work with him.

On the other hand, I don't like the idea of a president circumventing the legislature through executive action, even when that president is pursuing an agenda with which I agree, because it sets a pretty frightening precedent for the next time there's a president with whose agenda I don't agree, and who may be thwarted by Congress for damn good reasons.

It's a bad situation, and it's the fault of the Republicans—who, I've no doubt, will at the earliest possible opportunity take advantage of the precedent they're forcing this president to set.