Aides: Obama may bypass Congress to meet goals

U.S. President Barack Obama's State of the Union will include proposals he could pursue without Congress, aides said -- a plan Sen. Rand Paul called "a threat." "We need to ensure the American people that we can get something done, either through Congress or on our own," senior strategic adviser Dan Pfeiffer told CNN's "State of the Union." The White House and Congress can work together to pass immigration reform, extend unemployment benefits and pass the farm bill, which has lingered on the congressional to-do list for two years, Pfeiffer said. "But the president is not going to tell the American people that he's going to wait for Congress. He's going to move forward in areas like job training, education, manufacturing, on his own to try to restore opportunity for American families," he said. Those moves would take the form of executive orders, Pfeiffer said. Executive orders have the full force of law. Obama is to deliver his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress Tuesday. White House spokesman Jay Carney told ABC's "This Week": "What we saw last year, in 2013, was a Washington that did not deliver for the American people. And the president sees this as a year of action, to work with Congress where he can and to bypass Congress where necessary, to lift folks who want to come up into the middle class." Pfeiffer said he didn't see this approach as "confrontational." But Paul, R-Ky., who appeared on the CNN program right after Pfeiffer, said he disagreed with Pfeiffer's view. "It sounds vaguely like a threat," Paul said. "And I think it also has a certain amount of arrogance in the sense that one of the fundamental principles of our country are the checks and balances, that it wasn't supposed to be easy to pass legislation. You had to debate and convince people." Presidents since George Washington have issued executive orders. Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat sworn in 100 years ago, issued the most, with 1,803. Obama has issued 167. President George W. Bush issued 291. Paul and other Republican lawmakers said Sunday they would work with the White House on narrow issues in which Republicans and Democrats agree. Paul said Republicans would be happy to move forward on parts of an immigration overhaul if Democrats changed from demanding what he characterized as an all-or-nothing approach. "On immigration, maybe half of immigration reform, 80 percent of Congress agrees to," Paul said. "But to my mind, the Democrats are saying they want everything -- citizenship, everything they can get -- all at once, or nothing, whereas I think there's an in-between where we could find work visas for a lot of the people that are here and normalize their existence, as long as ... it's dependent on border security," he said. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told "Fox News Sunday" his party was willing to compromise, but only up to a point. "We're anxious to help him create jobs, but we're not going to go over and endorse more spending, more debt, more taxes and more regulation," he said.