By KENDALL BREITMAN | 11/6/14 7:44 AM EST


Condoleezza Rice said on Thursday that if President Barack Obama wants to tackle immigration in his last two years in office, he can’t do it through executive actions.

“We can’t have a circumstance in which we are going after a problem as meddlesome and potentially divisive as immigration by executive action only, this has to go through the people’s representatives,” the former secretary of state said in an interview with Brian Kilmeade of “Fox and Friends.” “That’s our system, that’s the Congress.”

Rice said that after Republicans dominated the midterm elections, the American people need to “watch what happens now” and see whether Obama will reach across the aisle.

“I hope that what he plans to do is to take the message that the American people don’t like the course that we’re on and there has to be change,” Rice said. “He’s going to have to work with Republicans, not just to do the things that the president wants to do, but to do things in a bipartisan fashion that need to be done for the American people.”

Looking to the future, Rice says that she expects a “good field” of Republicans to run in 2016 for president.

“I am very fond of Jeb Bush, he’s a friend, he was a terrific governor of Florida, I worked with him on some immigration issues,” she said. “I’m in a mode to listen and let people debate and let’s see who emerges and comes forward.”

As far as a potential presidential run for Rice? She says she is not interested.

“I am a professor at Stanford, I am a happy professor at Stanford, that’s where I’m staying,” she said. “I got the chance to be the secretary of state, I’m an international relations specialist, it doesn’t get better than that.”

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/1...on-112635.html