Split Congress Mulls Denial of Military Force Request
Source: Bloomberg News
No U.S. president has ever been turned down by Congress when asking to use military force.
President Barack Obama doesn’t want to become the first.
To avoid that with a request for military action in Syria, he’ll have to win over war-weary Democrats, Tea Party members who don’t see a threat to U.S. interests and other lawmakers who want more details and more time.
Obama has supporters on both sides of the aisle in the U.S. Senate, where he’ll need a handful of Republican votes. It’s a tougher path in the House, where an alliance of Tea Party members and left-leaning Democrats is coalescing against using force in Syria.
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Representative Alan Grayson, a Florida Democrat, has started an online petition to galvanize public opposition to action in Syria and promised in an Internet posting on Twitter that he’d push fellow lawmakers to do the same.
Representative Justin Amash, a Michigan Republican endorsed by the political action committees affiliated with Club for Growth and FreedomWorks, Washington-based limited-government groups, posted an Internet message on Sept. 1 that he was “even more skeptical” about the case for military intervention in Syria after hearing from White House officials.
Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-03/split-congress-mulls-denial-of-military-force-request.html
Looks like the Tea Party and Progressives have an excellent chance to block airstrikes.
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