Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., said Wednesday that President Obama is blowing a chance to fight the Islamic State by insisting on holding a climate summit in Paris next week, instead of turning that meeting into an emergency summit on radical Islamic extremism.
Obama said Tuesday that the Paris summit would be a “powerful rebuke” to the ISIS-led attack against Paris that killed 130 people, a comment that Blackburn said misses the point.
“I think it is very sad that this is something that our president would say,” she said on Fox Business.
“He’s very timid about how to take ISIS on, and how to define our enemy,” she added. “It is radical extremist Islam, and he needs to be able to say that, define the enemy, and then say, ‘Look, we’re going to turn this climate summit into a summit of how to eradicate radical extremism from the face of this Earth.'”
She said Obama’s focus on the environment after a wave of attacks around the world shows that Obama isn’t focusing on the right priority.
“I think it is misplaced priorities,” she said. “The biggest threat we have is national security, is dealing with radical Islamic extremists.”
On the climate summit, Blackburn predicted that Congress would block the $3 billion Obama is seeking for the global effort to reduce emissions.
“And we have done this before, repeatedly,” she said. “The House has voted to defund the efforts that the EPA is carrying out, and we will vote to do away with what he’s trying to do.”
