CONSTITUENTS ADAMANT
in opposition to strike, GOP congressmen say.
MIDWEST CITY, Okla. — Rep. Tom Cole started hearing it in the morning when he went to grab coffee.
“I was just at Starbucks, and a woman there recognized me,” the six-term Republican House member said at a Chamber of Commerce gathering. “She said, ‘Everybody here’s a no on Syria.’”
Cole’s office last week issued a statement announcing that he will vote against a military strike in Syria because of the intensity of opposition in his district.
“I literally cannot walk across the parking lot without being stopped to talk about this issue,” he said. “I haven’t seen anything quite like this.”
Cole’s constituent experience is not isolated. Rep. Mick Mulvaney, a Republican swept into power in 2010 in military-focused South Carolina on a platform of small government, said that in his three-plus years in Congress, no issue had elicited as passionate a response as Syria. And, he added, “to say it’s 99 percent against would be overstating the support.”
Of the 1,000 or so calls and emails he has received, three supported some kind of response. And two-thirds of the correspondents have never reached out to him before.
Rep. Candice Miller, R-Mich., said she was at a peach festival parade last weekend in her district, an event that does not typically draw the type of constituent who is overly political. But as she made her way down the parade route, one person after another urged her to vote no on any authorization of force in Syria.
“It was not a political event at all,” Miller said. “But there were a lot of people, older veterans especially in their hats, all saying, ‘No on Syria!’”
In the face of such overwhelming constituent opposition, congressional Republican leaders are treading extremely lightly. Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., the House majority leader, has come out strongly for military intervention in Syria, but in a one-on-one conversation with Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, he did not press the point, Chaffetz said.
In Cole’s case, speaker after speaker at an evening meeting questioned President Barack Obama’s assertion that he has constitutional authority to strike on his own — and insisted that Congress not give him authority.
The majority of people Cole represents in the southwest Oklahoma district rarely support Obama on much of anything; two-thirds of voters backed the Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, in November.
At the town meeting, which stretched beyond three hours in a Rose State College lecture hall, various constituents derided Obama as a socialist, demanded that Republicans shut down the government to block his healthcare plan and called for his impeachment. Many House Republicans have echoed those sentiments, seemingly making it difficult for them to back the president on his Syria plan despite their embrace of U.S. military power.
Tinker Air Force Base, employing 8,000 soldiers and another 15,000 civilians in Oklahoma, gives the area a natural affinity for the military. But that does not translate into reflexive support for the mission the commander in chief wants to order.
Partly that reflects the military’s traditional hesitance about hazy and circumscribed mission objectives. Before Obama decided to strike in response to use of chemical weapons in Syria, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, warned Congress in a letter this summer that “deeper involvement is hard to avoid” even with a limited intervention.
Cole, chief of staff at the Republican National Committee before winning his House seat, predicted the Democratic-controlled Senate would back the president. Obama has “a good chance” of prevailing in the House with the support of Republican and Democratic leaders, Cole said, but it is no sure thing.
But Cole said Obama didn’t have his support on Syria.
“If I break with my district, I better have an awfully compelling reason,” Cole said. And while he said he would listen to expert opinions on the matter, “I’m sure going to listen to opinion at the Starbucks.”