“Congress should be cutting spending, reducing the regulatory burdens that are crushing the economy — freedom works, and it is time we put it back to work.” — Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA)

Just a couple of days after President Barack Obama laid out his agenda for the next year in his State of the Union address, I sat down with Rep. Tom McClintock, a Republican who represents California’s Fourth Congressional District, to get his thoughts on the proposals being pushed by the White House, the Senate’s refusal to pass a budget, ObamaCare, and a few other issues.

On the State of the Union, Rep. McClintock, who has been among the staunchest defenders of economic freedom and the Constitution in Congress, was dismissive of President Obama’s agenda. “[W]e heard this song before,” he noted. “I think that his words have to be measured against the last four years of his deeds.”

He rhetorically asked, “What have been his policies? Higher taxes, much higher spending, out of control deficits, crushing business regulations. And what have those policies produced? Family take home pay has declined over these past four years, the unemployment rate is higher than when we started — it would be much higher except for the millions of Americans who have given up even looking for work.”

“What did he propose? More of the same,” Rep. McClintock stated. “Taking bad policy and doubling down on it doesn’t make it good policy.”

When it came to Senate Democrats’ failure to pass a budget, Rep. McClintock explained that it “will take an election where the American people are paying close attention,” noting that 2010 was such an election. “Unfortunately, I think they lost that focus in 2012,” Rep. McClintock surmised. “The only good news I can offer on that front is the American people are about to get a college-level course in Obamanomics. And at the end of that course, I think they’re going to be a lot sadder and a lot wiser.”

On healthcare, Rep. McClintock firmly believes that “ObamaCare will undo ObamaCare,” adding that it’s “a system that will ultimately collapse of its own weight.”

“You remember, they called it the Affordable Care Act. It’s supposed to bend the cost curve down,” Rep. McClintock recounted. “Of course, the Medicare actuary is now telling us [that ObamaCare is] going to increase our costs by $300 billion above what we would otherwise be spending.”

Rep. McClintock’s concern about America’s future doesn’t end with economic issues. He was critical of the lines that have been blurred between war and peace, indicating that the problem goes back to the beginning of the war on terror. Rep. McClintock expressed concern over President Obama’s drones program, explaining that it’s a ”violation of every tenet of American due process.”

With the gun control proposals popping up in Congress and in state legislatures across the country, Rep. McClintock explained, “We have a lot of practical experience with gun control.”

“It is extremely effective at disarming law-abiding citizens. It is utterly ineffective at disarming criminals and madmen,” Rep. McClintock explained. “So we end up in a society the law-abiding population is defenseless and criminal population is fully armed. That’s a very unstable situation.”

And on the talk of a “civil war” inside the Republican Party, Rep. McClintock noted, “From the very inception of the Republican Party, the central principle has been summarized in a word — freedom.”

“The closer we have adhered to that principle, the better we have done,” he explained. “The further we have drifted from that principle, the worse we and the country have done.”

Be sure to check out Rep. McClintock on Facebook and Twitter.