Biden asks House to pass Israel aid. House passes Israel aid. Biden rejects it
Byron York
BIDEN ASKS HOUSE TO PASS ISRAEL AID. HOUSE PASSES ISRAEL AID. BIDEN REJECTS IT. For the last four weeks, since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, Israel has been in the midst of a major security crisis. In the United States, there is a bipartisan consensus on Capitol Hill that the U.S. should increase aid to the embattled nation. President Joe Biden has requested $14.3 billion in emergency aid, on top of the nearly $4 billion the U.S. gives to Israel each year.
On Thursday, the Republican-controlled House passed Biden’s request, giving the president every dollar he sought for Israeli aid. But now, the Democratic-controlled Senate is preparing to kill the aid just passed by the House, with Biden threatening to veto his own request if it somehow got through the Senate. What’s going on?
What’s going on is this: While Biden and Senate Democrats do want to help Israel, they want to do it their way or not at all.
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There are two big questions involved, and both have to do with the process of how things are done in Washington. The first question is: Should Congress pass aid to Israel alone, or should the aid be included in a big package with aid to Ukraine? The second question is: Should Congress add other, unrelated measures to the aid bill(s), or not?
The Biden administration wants to put everything into one big, $106 billion bill — Israel aid, Ukraine aid, plus, for some reason, several billion dollars for what the administration calls “border security” but is actually money intended to expedite the arrival, care, and relocation of illegal crossers at the U.S.-Mexico border. The administration’s argument is that the Israel and Ukraine aid are related — both are needed to counter and deter Russia, Iran, and China. Why throw in the border measures? Well, maybe if they are portrayed as “security,” they might attract some Republican votes.
House Republicans want to consider two separate bills, one for Israel and one for Ukraine. They have a point. Israel’s retaliation after the Hamas attacks and Ukraine’s defense against the Russian invasion are two separate conflicts, in two separate countries, in two different parts of the world, with different combatants. Plus, one of them, the just-beginning fight in Israel, has more support among U.S. voters than the Ukraine war, now in its second year.
Republicans point out that the administration’s requests for Israel and Ukraine are quite different. Biden asked for roughly $14 billion to aid Israel and $61 billion for Ukraine. Given that Biden had been having trouble winning more Ukraine aid on Capitol Hill — Congress has already approved $113 billion, and some lawmakers do not want to keep up that level of spending — the administration’s new request made some Republicans suspect that Biden took the opportunity of a new conflict in Israel to try to win Ukraine aid by attaching it to the more popular Israel measure. Also, it appears Biden is trying to get Congress to approve so much aid to Ukraine that he, Biden, won’t have to ask for any more until after the 2024 election.
On the substance of it, the Republicans who want two bills have the better argument. It just makes sense to pass two different bills for two different wars. So that is what the House did on Thursday, passing the $14.3 billion Israel aid measure.
Then there is the second question: Should any extraneous measures be attached to the aid? The Biden administration already answered that question by including the request for spending on the U.S.-Mexico border in the overall request for Israel and Ukraine. That’s pretty unrelated, isn’t it? To the Biden White House, there is nothing particularly sacred about aid to Israel, or to Ukraine, that means an unrelated spending measure can’t be thrown in, too.
That’s where new House Speaker Mike Johnson comes in. Having already decided to pass Israel aid separately from aid to Ukraine, he then decided to add a measure to help pay the $14 billion cost. He chose a path that is particularly popular with House Republicans. Remember those billions of dollars for tens of thousands new Internal Revenue Service agents that the Biden administration included in the misleadingly named Inflation Reduction Act? That money hasn’t been spent yet. So Johnson said, let’s take $14 billion out of that to pay for the emergency aid to Israel. And that is what the House did.
Johnson’s bid was a big success with Republicans. The bill got 214 GOP votes versus just two Republican votes against. It also won 12 Democratic votes, while 194 Democrats voted against. So, in total, the bill passed with some room to spare with 226 votes. It could even be plausibly called bipartisan, with those dozen Democrats joining in.
So, the House passed aid to Israel at a critical moment. That’s good, right? Wrong. In the Senate, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called the House bill “unserious and inadequate.” “Let me be clear,” he posted on X. “The Senate will not take up the House GOP’s deeply flawed proposal. Instead, we will work on our own bipartisan emergency aid package that includes funding for aid to Israel, Ukraine, humanitarian aid including for Gaza, and competition with the Chinese government.” Schumer added that he was “glad President Biden issued a veto threat over this stunningly unserious proposal.”
It looks like Speaker Johnson really got under their skin. Obviously, the problem is not miscellaneous add-ons because the Senate and White House are doing some adding on themselves. And the problem can’t be aid to Israel, because the House passed what the president requested. So, what can it be? It appears Democrats are so angry about the form of the House bill — Israel only, not Ukraine — plus Johnson’s added IRS measure, that they will vote against much-needed aid to Israel.
Some press coverage adopted a storyline suggesting that Johnson is playing politics and sabotaging aid. But former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer looked at it another way. Reacting to a piece in Politico, Fleischer posted, “The premise of this story is that Johnson is not listening to Schumer, and that Johnson is taking a risk not doing what Schumer wants to do. Why isn’t it the opposite? Why isn’t the story that Schumer isn’t listening to Johnson?”
Why indeed? Of course Johnson’s move was political. But so was the White House’s opening gambit, plus everything Schumer has done after that. And here is the bottom line. The president wanted the House to pass aid to Israel. The House passed aid to Israel. And now, the president and his party are rejecting it.
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