The president has become too powerful relative to Congress, former General Electric boss Jack Welch told CNBC on Friday, as optimism increased for a debt ceiling extension and an agreement to end the 11-day government shutdown.
"That's been happening for a long time and it's accelerated this time" under President Barack Obama, said Welch, executive chairman of the management institute at Strayer University that bears his name.
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President Obama has changed "15 regulations at least" from the time Obamacare was law, he said. "Law in enforced by regulation. He changed the employer mandate. He put Congress in. He did a whole series of things," Welch said.
He also said both sides of the aisle have failed "Negotiation 101" by not putting themselves in each other's shoes and trying to figure out what the other side would accept.
"Both sides went down the wrong path. The Republicans take on the president's signature [health-care] bill and they say, 'Defund it.' By definition, that's not sitting across the table," he added, saying the GOP are the worst marketers of their ideas. "I wouldn't let Republicans market an iPad when it came out," he said. "They can't market anything."
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"Then the president says, 'I will not negotiate.' That's not a position I can accept either," Welch said.
In another example of how he finds the president too powerful, Welch said: "[The president] can arbitrarily legislate around Congress on clean air." He believes the overreach of the presidency "started early in the Bush administration [and] a bit in the Clinton administration."
This article originally appeared in CNBC.
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