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.”
Join the official YWN WhatsApp status
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