From the Communications Director of the DNC, Brad Woodhouse:
I find it hard to disagree.
This was in response to Speaker Boehner calling in to a radio show to denounce President Obama's 'campaigning' on the taxpayers' dime when he travelled to various college campuses to draw attention to the imminent increase in student loan interest rates.
“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.”
So articulate and eloquent the Speaker is that he resorts to junior-high level vocabulary to cbaracterize the President.
“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,”
Sure, you're already working on it. Because President Obama forced you to.
And the GOP leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky,
similarly lashed out this week as the president sought support for the low interest rates on college campuses.
"If the President was more interested in solving this problem than in hearing the sound of his own voice or the applause of college students, all he’d have to do is pick up the phone and work it out with Congress," McConnell said.
Sure, because Republicans in Congress are so receptive to the President. The rich irony coming from 'the one' whose main objective was to make sure President Obama was a one-term president.
Still, House Republicans scrambled to respond to the president by rushing to the floor for a Friday vote on their own legislation preventing the interest rate increase.
The Republican National Committee thinks this is a real problem.
Boehner’s criticism of Obama’s travel follows by a day the Republican National Committee’s filing of a complaint with the Government Accountability Office. The complaint charged the White House with “passing off campaign travel as official events.”
And Rep. Darrell Issa got in on the act.
“This could certainly fall under travel abuse,” Issa said of the Obama trip. “I think if the president wants to not be in a gray area and be clearly in the right area, he should make it very clear that now that he’s clearly in campaign mode, that these trips which obviously have direct a campaign relationship, both his and the vice president’s, should be reimbursed under campaign rules.”
The White House responded:
At the White House briefing on Thursday, press secretary Jay Carney defended Obama’s travel, saying it was “obvious” that the president was on the road to tout a student loan extension
“And he did it effectively,” Carney said, pointing to the GOP’s scramble to back the issue. “This has gotten a lot of attention and Congress hopefully will act because of that,” Carney said. “I think it is eminently obvious that the president was out talking about a policy issue. And he did it effectively.
“It is also ironic to me that the arguments about this are coming from people who know that we assiduously follow all the rules in terms of the delineations between campaign travel and official travel,” he said. “Just as our predecessor did.”
Very effectively I might add.
And now that Obama has forced the GOP's hand and maneuvered them into having to deal with it, the battle over how to pay for it falls into predictable disagreement on how to pay for it:
On Friday, the Republican-controlled House plans to vote to extend the lower rate for another year and to pay for it by slashing $6 billion from a preventive care fund created under Obama’s health-care law. The proposal puts Republicans squarely at odds with Senate Democrats, who introduced legislation Wednesday to pay for the extension by imposing new payroll taxes on some businesses with three or fewer shareholders — so-called “S corporations.”
where the GOP in a classic Cantor-esque move wants to rob Peter to pay Paul.
And props to WaPo for correctly saying 'shareholders' and not 'workers' as most MSM likes to deliberately misconstrue:
Democrats want to tax upper-income earners -- those earning more than $200,000 a year or $250,000 for couples -- who are able to avoid certain taxes because they organize their income as small, so-called subchapter-S corporations. Those companies with fewer than three workers would be hit with the new tax.