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After word reached the White House staff who had gathered for a drink in the hotel bar one night last week that President Obama was working out an aggressive climate deal with the Chinese president, the first toast was to the planet.

The second was to the message they believed they were about to broadcast back home: that Obama can still check big things off his to-do list.

"We're not just amblin' off here," said one senior advisor traveling with the president on a weeklong tour of Asia and Australia that began with the surprising commitment with China to cut carbon pollution.

The tour began as a relaunch of sorts closing the books on a fall campaign season largely free of any real initiatives and highlighting Obama's agenda for his final two years in office.

The ambition might prove delusional. Weakened as the president is by the bruising he and his Democratic Party took in the midterm elections, there are serious questions about whether he can achieve anything with the GOP in control of Congress. Awaiting Obama in Washington are Republican leaders already preparing to curb his ambitions on climate, immigration and other issues the president has said he'll act on without lawmakers.

"Congress is going to stand up to the president, and the American people expect them to do that," Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah said Sunday on CBS' "Face the Nation."

For his part, Obama said Sunday in a news conference here that he will "build on the momentum" of the last week when he returns to the White House.

"He seems determined to take signature issues on the legacy he wants to leave and use his executive authority as effectively as he can" to act on them, said Kenneth Lieberthal, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former Asia director in President Clinton's National Security Council. "That's going to get a lot of yelling and screaming from the other side of the aisle."

The clamor began right away. Congressional Republicans vented over the weekend about the president's deal with China and promise to reform immigration by executive fiat.

"This president, right now, is choosing friction, partisanship and accomplishment instead of cooperation," Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) said on "Fox News Sunday." "There's an opportunity for us to get some things done here, and instead, the president is going down this unilateral path."

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Obama's Asia tour relaunches his efforts on 'legacy' issues