Fellow Americans, I’m Jim DeMint with the Heritage Foundation.
You will hear much this week about the state of our union, but we know one thing already – our union will be much weaker and even more divided if the President attempts to rule the country by himself.


President Obama warned that he has a pen and a phone—and that’s all he needs to rule from Washington. The White House said he “doesn’t think the American people would want him to limit himself” to what Congress is doing.
The President is not an innocent bystander, it is his War on Congress, which is really a war on the people’s representative government, that got us into this mess in the first place — Rather than bringing the country together as he promised, the President divided the nation by passing wasteful stimulus spending and government controlled health care with strictly partisan votes. The president got his way and helped his special interest supporters, but Americans got stuck with the bill as our economy stagnated  and as our health care system became more expensive and complicated.
This president has acted like the playground bully who when he can’t have everything he wants, he decides to take his ball and go home.
This is not the way our government is supposed to work.
The President has the sworn  duty under our Constitution  to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” —not to unilaterally ignore, amend or rewrite them on his own.
President Obama and his apologists insist that ruling through executive action is the only option because we live in an exceptionally partisan age.
Tell that to Ronald Reagan who worked with a Congress led by liberal Democrats, or Bill Clinton, who found ways to work with a Congress that had impeached him.
Instead of his forcing through controversial policies that the majority of Americans oppose, we should move forward on ideas that unite America. School choice, welfare reform and debt reduction are areas most Americans agree on.
And on issues on where we disagree, individual states can enact solutions tailored for their citizens. Not every problem demands a response from the U.S. government. Instead of having Washington control programs and purse strings, we should allow the states to develop their own approaches
I ask President Obama not to divide us further by acting like an imperial president.
The State of our Union will be much stronger and more united if he works with the elected representatives of the people, instead of threatening them.
Jim DeMint is the President of  The Heritage Foundation . http://www.heritage.org/   He was formerly a Republican Senator from South Carolina from 2005 to 2013.