Today not a single Tennessee Republican voted to authorize President Obama’s military effort in Libya. But some of them stopped short of pulling funds from that NATO-led mission.
Marsha Blackburn, Stephen Fincher, and John Duncan rejected the call to end money for U.S. airstrikes and drone attacks, but they joined in the rebuke of President Obama for entering the Libya conflict at all without congressional authorization.
Fellow Republican Scott DesJarlais -along with Diane Black, Chuck Fleischmann and Phil Roe – did vote to defund the Libyan action. DesJarlais says he’s not sure what the U.S. is doing in Libya — that the mission has fluctuated too much from a humanitarian effort to ousting Moammar Gadhafi to forcing new elections.
“We need a clear objective to get behind it. And we would like the president to come to Congress and tell us what the objective is, or I don’t think it’s wise to spend American tax dollars on a war or conflict that we don’t know exactly what the mission is.”
Democrats Steve Cohen and Jim Cooper supported both the limited military involvement and the funds for it in the votes today.
Capitol News Connection contributed to this story.
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