Rep. Steve King says Hillary Clinton's recent foray to Iowa, the all-important stomping ground of potential presidential candidates, turned out to be a lackluster trip with virtually zero excitement.
"Lack of excitement is maybe an understatement," King, an Iowa Republican, said Monday on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
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"The 'fingernails on the chalkboard' was Hillary's return to the Tom Harkin steak fry when she stepped up the podium on the hayrack and said in perfect, screechy voice 'I'm baaaaack.'
"That will play over and over again in Iowa. If I were a young, up-and-coming Democrat, I might look at running for presidency."
King said there's a good chance that President Barack Obama will veto the Keystone XL pipeline project, an act that could trigger a government shutdown with Republicans defunding certain programs to fight him.
"He is a stubborn man. I heard him talk in the last few days about why he's against it because his oil might be available on the global market. I don't know whether he understands that we do have a global market for oil and the more available oil is to us, the cheaper it will be to us," he said.
"I've dealt with the Canadians for several years on this. The Canadians will be able to pipeline to the Pacific and they will send heavy Canadian crude to China to be refined."
But Republican lawmakers should not be blamed if a shutdown is instigated by the White House, according to King.
"When I read the Constitution it says Congress has the power of the purse, Congress has the enumerated power for naturalization and, by strong implication, immigration policy," he said.
"And Congress has also other powers to restrain an overreaching executive branch. Our Founding Fathers wanted us to do that and they want us to be the voice of the people and that's why we have elections in the House every two years."
"I hope it doesn't come to that. I hope the president reconsiders and takes a deep breath and revisits his oath of office. I don't expect that. I hope that happens, but if he pulls the trigger on executive amnesty, it looks to me it has to be a gross obscene violation of the Constitution."
A blanket amnesty would have to be addressed immediately by Congress, he said.
"That's when the House and the conservatives in the Senate get their back up immediately. I've had trouble convincing them that we should go deeply into the decisions on how we strategize in the hypothetical scenario of the president violating the Constitution," King said.
"They just didn't seem to want to light up on that end in September. Now, I can see it. I can see their blood pressure going up. The more imminent it is, the likelier the members of Congress are to keep their oath of office...."
"When we stopped sending bills over to the Senate a year and a couple of months ago, it resulted in a government shutdown. We funded everything except Obamacare, [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid refused to take them up and the president refused to sign them. It's on them, not us."
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