House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Thursday called on President Obama�s campaign to reimburse taxpayers for the cost of a campaign-style trip to battleground states, accusing the White House of a �pathetic� attempt to stir up an election-year fight over student loans.
�This week the president traveled across the country on taxpayers� dime at a cost of $179,000 an hour insisting the Congress fix a problem that we were already working on. Frankly, I think this is beneath the dignity of the White House,� Boehner said at the outset of his weekly Capitol press briefing.
Obama this week traveled to college campuses in North Carolina, Iowa and Colorado � three battleground states � and held large rallies to urge Congress to prevent a looming hike in student loan interest rates. The trip was billed as official White House business, but Boehner said that claim �didn�t pass the straight-face test� and that Obama was creating �a fake fight� purely for political purposes.
Still, House Republicans scrambled to respond to the president by rushing their own legislation preventing the interest rate increase to the floor for a Friday vote.
�Democrats and Republicans knew this was going to take effect. Democrats and Republicans fully expected this would be taken care of,� Boehner said, �and for the president to make a campaign issue out of this and then to travel to three battleground states and go to three large college campuses on taxpayers� money to try to make this a political issue is pathetic.
“His campaign ought to be reimbursing the Treasury for the cost of this trip.�
�Our country is facing some major economic and fiscal challenges,� the Speaker added, �yet here�s the president wasting time on a fake fight to try to gain his own reelection.�
�This is the biggest job in the world, and I�ve never seen the president make it smaller.�
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2 Responses
Every modern president from both parties has made such trips during an election year and his opponents have always whined about using the office of the president as a taxpayer-paid bully pulpit. The White House lawyes review all these trips and they are all technically legal. Its impossible for a President to avoid promoting his policy agenda at the taxpayer expense while campaigning. Bohner should chill out
This rotten president has been in campaign for over a year already. No president did that