Commander-In-Chief Obama Threatens To Veto Pay Protection For Our Troops

by Joseph Klein
Posted on April 8 2011 9:44 am

Our brave troops have answered the call of duty, as they always do. They do not deserve to be cut off from being paid if there is a government shutdown. Yet that is precisely what their Commander-In-Chief has threatened to do.

Yesterday, the House of Representatives passed a contingency continuing resolution that would have ensured funding of the military for the rest of this 2011 fiscal year, as well as continuing to keep the rest of the government open for another week to permit more time for negotiations. In essence, the House protected our troops from financial harm if there is ultimately a shutdown of the government over the budget impasse. President Obama’s response was a veto threat.

Although significantly escalating the war in Afghanistan and beginning another war in Libya without congressional authorization, Obama is showing his ingratitude and disrespect for our troops’ sacrifices by threatening to veto the House bill protecting their pay for the rest of this 2011 fiscal year.

The administration issued a statement that characterized the financial lifeline to our military men and women as a

distraction from the real work that would bring us closer to a reasonable compromise for funding the remainder of Fiscal Year 2011 and avert a disruptive Federal Government shutdown that would put the Nation’s economic recovery in jeopardy… If presented with this bill, the President will veto it.

In addition to the numbers gap of about $7 billion and disagreements over where the cuts should come from, Obama and the Senate Democrats are trying to protect such sacred cows of theirs as Planned Parenthood, public broadcasting, Obamacare and Environmental Protection Agency powers to substitute itself for Congress in regulating greenhouse gas. Apparently, protecting federal funding for an abortion mill, subsidizing left-wing broadcasting with taxpayer money and cap-and-tax regulations are more important to Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid than seeing to it that our brave men and women in uniform continue to be paid.

Obama and the Democratic-controlled Senate are playing raw politics over a budget that they should have passed months ago when the Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate by significant majorities. Yet, the New York Times lead editorial today – surprise, surprise – blames the Republicans for holding

the government hostage to get its way on abortion and the environment

As usual, the Times is living in an alternative universe. Now, for the first time in American history, it is the Commander-in-Chief presiding over three simultaneous wars who is holding the troops under his ultimate command hostage in a budget fight that would not have occurred if the Democrats had done their job in the first place.

With his usual demagoguery, Jesse Jackson yesterday compared the current budget fight on MSNBC’s “Martin Bashirâ€