Showdown With Congress Could Stall Obama Travel, Again

March 2, 2011, 7:44 am
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

On March 19, President Obama will take off on his first foreign trip of 2011, a five-day Latin American excursion to Brazil, El Salvador and Chile.
Or he won’t.

Once again, politics at home is threatening Mr. Obama’s freedom to travel abroad as the two-week budget extension passed by the House on Tuesday appears likely to expire — on March 18.

It’s possible that Congress will have agreed to another two-week extension by then, giving Mr. Obama a window of opportunity for global diplomacy without worry. But the history of this White House would suggest otherwise.

On several occasions, Mr. Obama’s planned trips have been delayed, altered, shifted, shrunk and even canceled altogether as domestic politics forced him to stay at home.
In March of 2010, Mr. Obama’s aides said the president would delay by several days his planned trip to Indonesia, Australia, Guam and Bali so that he could be in Washington during the final votes on his health care legislation.

As the bickering in Washington stretched out even longer than expected, Mr. Obama ended up canceling the March trip altogether and announced that he would travel to the countries in June instead.

But by the summertime, Mr. Obama was confronting the environmental and political effects of a still gushing oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. The Asia trip was off again, and eventually took place in the fall.

By December, though, the schedule was once again working against the president. His departure for Hawaii, where he and his family planned to vacation during the holidays, was delayed by five days as lawmakers worked to find compromise during the lame-duck session of Congress.

Could it happen again?
In a statement, Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, described the Latin American trip as one in which the president would confront issues of “regional and global concern,” like trade, energy and security.

“The trip will provide an opportunity to engage key bilateral partners, to highlight the president’s engagement with the hemisphere, and to advance our efforts to work as equal partners to address the basic challenges facing the people of the Americas,” Mr. Carney said.

But the care and feeding of America’s allies, however important, become less politically important as the president and his rivals begin gearing up for a re-election campaign.

The House passed the two-week budget measure on Tuesday to keep the government open, and the Senate is expected to quickly follow. But it offered little evidence of a long-term compromise that could avoid a heated confrontation just as the president is scheduled to leave the country.

Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, the majority leader, called the cuts included in the measure “terribly mischievous and wrongheaded.” And Speaker John Boehner, a Republican, has made it clear that he is not interested in a series of short-term budget resolutions that don’t include the cuts demanded by Republicans.
That could mean renewing a showdown in mid-March, potentially without Mr. Obama in the country.

Of course, he could leave anyway. The current debate is more about a legislative fight in Congress than it is a face-off with Mr. Obama. But that perception could shift quickly if the two sides were to fail to reach agreement and the government were to shut down with the president out of the country.

In the next couple of weeks, Mr. Obama, Mr. Reid and Mr. Boehner may not have the toughest jobs in Washington.

That distinction may go to the staff responsible for scheduling the president’s foreign travel.

Source: The Caucus: The Political and Government Blog of The Times

Newer Post Older Post