House Speaker John Boehner Calls on President Obama to 'Get Serious' on ISIS
President Obama's acknowledgment of no "complete strategy" irke Boehner.
— -- House Speaker John Boehner continued to hit at President Obama over the struggle against ISIS, complaining that there is no current strategy to “stop the spread of this horrible disease."
While Boehner once again called on the president to withdraw his draft proposal of an Authorization for the Use of Military Force, he again declined to direct the House to present its own strategy to defeat the Islamic State.
"We have one commander in chief at a time, that’s the president of the United States. He has no strategy, as he admitted himself, much less an overarching strategy to take on ISIL and the other terrorist threats that we face in the Middle East,” Boehner, R-Ohio, said during his news conference this morning in the Capitol. “As I’ve called on, the president should withdraw the AUMF that he sent up here that calls for less authority then they have today under the law and get serious.”
Boehner dismissed the notion of sending combat forces back to Iraq.
"This whole idea of 100,000 more troops on the ground, that's nonsense. That's not what anybody is calling for. But it's clear that our training mission alone has not been enough to slow down the spread of ISIL, and more needs to -- more needs to be happening on the ground, and we or our allies need to be playing a stronger role,” he said. “What’s the overarching strategy that the Unites States and our allies are going to employ to go out and stop the spread of this horrible disease?”
Boehner stressed that the president’s AUMF should be designed around a winning strategy – which he doesn’t see in the president’s current draft proposal.
“We don’t have a strategy, and you can’t have an authorization of the use of military force if you don’t know what the strategy is,” he said.
Boehner added that there’s “a discussion” about how to move ahead on an AUMF in the House, but he added that “it’s difficult to do when the president hasn’t outlined a strategy in order to win.”
White House spokesman Josh Earnest responded to Boehner's comments during the daily briefing there, saying the president had explicitly asked Congress for a war powers authorization that addressed the current fight against ISIS, not a broader endeavor.
"At some point, the speaker of the House needs to take responsibility for fulfilling the basic duty of the United States Congress, and that is when it comes to these kinds of matters, Congress should have a voice. And Congress, frankly, shouldn't be ducking the debate," Earnest said.
Reacting to the White House’s announcement U.S. military advisers are being sent to Iraq to help train Iraqis, Boehner called the move a step in the right direction. Nevertheless, he said it wouldn’t do much to change the momentum on the ground in Iraq and Syria.
“Again, I support the tactical move the president’s taking, but where’s the overarching strategy to deal with state – the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the region, Iran, and to deal with the ISIL and all of their related groups?”