The White House and House Speaker John Boehner are fighting over who will have the last word on Libya, effectively devolving the debate over presidential war powers into a pithy game of political mudslinging. Boehner, R-Ohio, said Thursday that he’s not satisfied with President Obama’s legal justification for engaging the U.S. military in Libya without seeking congressional approval, and the White House responded with an attack on the House speaker — digging up something he said 12 years ago, and accusing him of flip-flopping his views on presidential war powers.
In a legal analysis sent to Boehner and the rest of Congress this week, White House attorneys said Obama didn’t need congressional approval to involve the United States in Libya as part of a NATO mission because the operation does not amount to a war.
“Yet we’ve got drone attacks under way. We’re spending $10 million a day, part of an effort to drop bombs on Gadhafi’s compound,” Boehner said Thursday. “It doesn’t pass the straight face test in my view that we’re not in the midst of hostilities.”
Boehner demanded further legal analysis from the White House and threatened to withhold funding from the Libyan mission if the president doesn’t comply.
“The Congress has the power of the purse, and certainly that is an option,” Boehner warned.
An hour after Boehner spoke, White House press secretary Jay Carney marched into the briefing room armed with a statement Boehner made in 1999 questioning the constitutionality of the War Powers Resolution, the mandate that the House speaker now says Obama violated in Libya.
“I think it’s simply important to know what his views were then,” Carney said, before dictating parts of Boehner’s statements about former President Clinton’s decision to circumvent congressional approval and dispatch U.S. forces to the Balkans.
“Invoking the constitutionally suspect War Powers Act may halt our nation’s snowballing involvement in the Kosovo quagmire,” Boehner said. “But it is also likely to tie the hands of future presidents who will need the authority to lead in crises with less ambiguous implications for our national security.”
Carney also flatly denied Boehner’s request for further legal analysis from the White House.
“We have from the beginning consulted regularly with Congress — more than 40 times, and 41 at least if you add yesterday’s substantial report that we provided to Congress, which included our legal reasoning with regards to the War Powers Resolution,” Carney said. “So I don’t anticipate further elucidation of our legal reasoning, because I think it was quite clear.”
Boehner’s office quickly fired back, accusing Obama of flip-flopping as well, and referring reporters to a statement Obama made in 2007, in which he pledged support for congressional war powers.
“After Vietnam, Congress swore it would never again be duped into war, and even wrote a new law — the War Powers Act — to ensure it would not repeat its mistakes,” then-Sen. Obama said. “But … no law can give Congress a backbone if it refuses to stand up as the co-equal branch the Constitution made it.”
The two men are scheduled to meet for a round of golf on Sunday.
