Here’s an idea for the 2017 State of the Union address

President Barack Obama is set to deliver his sixth State of the Union Address tonight. His senior advisors have indicated that he will lay out his plan to bypass congress and continue his unprecedented use of executive power to advance his agenda on pet issues like “climate change” and “income inequality.”

“I have a pen and I have a phone,” the president has said, leading CBS to refer to tonight’s speech as “Obama’s MacGyver moment”

The MacGyver presidency is upon us. In the eponymous 1980s television show, the hero was regularly getting himself out of scrapes by using everyday objects in unexpected and winning ways. In one episode, he combined a microphone, a rubber mat, and a candle. The result: a defibrillator. In another, he used branches and rosary beads to make a rock catapult. The series fizzled out before he could achieve the promise of combining a colander and a first-edition Victor Hugo.

In the sixth year of a presidency, amid acute partisanship and low approval ratings, a president and his aides are also tied down and running out of options. So they too are trying to work magic from simple household items like a phone and a pen.

Then again, “MacGyver never had to deal with the Constitution and the separation of powers,” CBS reluctantly admitted.

So here we are, at a moment when the American presidency is the weakest it has ever been on the international stage, America’s chief executive will unilaterally grant himself extra-Constitutional powers to make the office the most powerful it has ever been within our borders.

“A Pen and Phone” sure is a long way from “Hope and Change.”

Remember those posters that flooded the streets in 2008?

Can we finally just come to grips with the fact that it is absurd to place our hope in any politician?

While American voters fawned over Obama’s soaring rhetoric and promises of a magically better tomorrow — not to mention free stuff — we diminished the far more important quality that candidate Obama lacked: plain ol’ common sense.

Enter Alabama’s Junior U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions.

On issue after issue during the Obama reign, Sessions has been the lonely voice of common sense crying out in a wilderness full of pseudo-intellectual progressive policymakers and talking heads.

Want some examples? There are plenty to choose from.

While the President, his Democratic allies in Congress and even some go-along-to-get-along Republicans have rushed to open the door to a flood of new immigrant labor, Sessions has calmly yet boldly made the simple argument that we don’t even have enough jobs for the Americans that are already here. So why would we further expand our guest worker program?

Here’s Sessions speaking on the Senate floor in November:

How he can possibly justify a plan that will double the flow of immigrant workers at a time when 91.5 million Americans are outside the labor force? Indeed, as the President makes his immigration remarks he is preparing to hold a fundraiser with Silicon Valley executives, a group clamoring for more guest workers at a time when nearly half of recent college grads are underemployed. Wages are flat and falling for U.S. workers — the clearest evidence that there is not a labor shortage, but a jobs shortage.

How about Sessions on the NSA spying on American citizens?

If it can’t be done constitutionally then we don’t need to be doing it.

Let the simplicity just wash over you for a moment.

Ok, well what about global warming?

Here’s Sessions challenging EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, who refused to answer whether or not the president’s climate change predictions had come true.

Sessions: “Is the temperature around the globe increasing faster than was predicted, even 10 years ago [as the President claimed]?”

McCarthy: “I can’t answer that question.”

Sessions: “You are asking us to impose billions of dollars of cost on this economy and you won’t answer the simple question of whether [temperature around the globe is increasing faster than predicted] is an accurate statement or not?”

What about the budget and America’s skyrocketing debt?

Here’s Sessions last March discussing Senate Democrats’ budget, which proposed adding over $7 trillion to America’s debt.

Honest people can disagree on policy. But where there can be no honest disagreement is the need to change our nation’s debt course… The Senate budget increases taxes, increases spending, and adds $7.3 trillion to our debt. It has zero real deficit reduction.

Most significantly, it never balances. Republicans gave Senate Democrats chance after chance to balance the budget. But they refused. They have declared to the whole nation their refusal to balance the federal budget.

The massive debt we have racked up to finance our wasteful government is pulling down growth today. Gross debt over 90 percent of GDP weakens growth now. Not tomorrow — now.

In other words, the more money we borrow to mail out government checks, the more and more people there are that will need government checks. This is why we can no longer define compassion as borrow-and-spend. Our goal should be to help more Americans find jobs, better wages, and to achieve financial independence. Is that not a better goal with a superior moral foundation?

Heck, in a video back last October, Sessions dropped five nuggets of conservative wisdom in less than 100 seconds!

1. “[The government is] impacting adversely the ability of America to produce American energy, creating jobs in the process.”
2. “We shouldn’t be doubling the number of guest workers that would be coming into America through this immigration reform when we already have high unemployment and falling wages.”
3. “You can’t regulate our way to prosperity.”
4. “This idea that we can borrow, tax, spend and create more debt to make America better in the long run is doomed to failure.”
5. “You can’t tax the economy and anyone in it over and over again and expect that will make the economy grow better.”

That’s more wisdom than President Obama has imparted on the nation in over five years in office. And I could go on and on with more examples of Sessions’ unique brand of common sense simply and concisely overpowering every liberal argument placed in front of him.

The Republican Party is woefully lacking a leader in Washington who can effectively communicate a common sense, conservative message to the American people.

That’s why it’s time to consider what it would take to give Sen. Jeff Sessions the platform to deliver his ideas to the nation.

There’s no better place to do that than from the podium during the 2017 State of the Union Address.

And with that, I humbly submit this proposal:

Follow Cliff on Twitter @Cliff_Sims