Opinion: President Obama and Speaker Boehner to have golf date in June
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President Obama has taken a lot of flak for his love of golf. Every president does, so it shouldn’t be a surprise.
Recently, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich floated his theory of Obama’s visits to the links.
‘It strikes me that the more difficult [the world] gets, the more the president golfs and the more the president hides,’ Gingrich, who aspires to be president himself, said on Fox News.
Well, the world must be very rough on the commander-in-chief, or perhaps the president wants to rub it into Gingrich’s face, because it was announced on Friday that Obama will be teeing up with current House Speaker John Boehner on June 18, according to Reuters.
The teary-eyed Ohio Republican has been one of Obama’s fiercest critics. Just today Boehner and other House GOP leaders passed a non-binding resolution asking the president to explain why he believes Libya is worthy of the recent U.S. military actions.
‘This resolution puts the president on notice,’ Boehner said of the bill, which passed 268 to 145. ‘He has a chance to get this right, and if he doesn’t, Congress will exercise its constitutional authority and we will make it right.’
Earlier, Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich saw his tougher resolution fail in the House. That bill complained that Congress wasn’t included in the decision to launch air strikes on Libya and said that the president had violated the War Powers Act. It also demanded that the U.S. stop supporting NATO in its Libyan mission within 15 days, something the speaker felt was too radical. ‘If Congress does not challenge a president’s dismissal of the clear meaning of Article 1, Section 8 [of the U.S. Constituion], then we will have tacitly endorsed a president’s violation of the Constitution and guaranteed the perpetuation of future constitutional transgressions,’ Kucinich said before his resolution fell to a 148 to 265 defeat.
While Boehner complained that Kucinich’s resolution ‘mandates a precipitous withdrawal from our role,’ the White House said that it has been including Congress in its attempts to rid Libya of its longtime president, Moammar Kadafi.
‘It is the view of this administration that we’ve acted in accordance with the War Powers Act because of this regular consultation,’ White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Friday.
‘We’ve been engaged in that consultation all along ... three separate briefings have been held just this week for members of Congress. We’re committed to that moving forward,’ Earnest told reporters.
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-- Tony Pierce
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