President Joe Biden’s insistence that multiple different topics be packaged together is an excuse to help him push through his more unpopular ideas, and it is a problem that has disillusioned people with politics as normal in Washington, D.C.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is planning for a vote on aid to Israel this week. Biden’s team then threatened to veto that, saying, “The Administration strongly opposes this ploy which does nothing to secure the border, does nothing to help the people of Ukraine defend themselves against Putin’s aggression, fails to support the security of American synagogues, mosques, and vulnerable places of worship, and denies humanitarian assistance to Palestinian civilians, the majority of whom are women and children.”
Why yes, aid for Israel does not do any of these things that are not aid for Israel and are, at best, tangentially related. That is kind of the whole point.
Regardless of the merits of the bill (my colleague Tom Rogan makes the case that Ukraine needs aid more than Israel does, and it’s one I agree with), the point is that all of these things do not need to be tied together. Aid for both Israel and Ukraine are at least related topics, but why should aid to Israel (or Ukraine) be tied to Biden’s disregard for the border crisis or to domestic funding for mosque security? At least the aid to Palestinians would also be related here, even if that aid just ends up going to the Hamas terrorists that are responsible for the war that we are then sending aid to address.
This isn’t just a Biden problem, either. Republicans had tied Ukraine funding to border security before the bad border deal was negotiated, and Johnson originally pushed a stand-alone Israel aid bill that included cuts to the Internal Revenue Service that was, of course, dead on arrival. Throwing unrelated slop together and stacking it high enough that there isn’t much time to debate any of it is a bipartisan tradition in Washington, D.C., and it is how you end up with the growing discontent with the system (Congress’s approval rating is 13%) and outsider politicians replete with flaws that voters want to challenge the system (such as former President Donald Trump).
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This goes to the same problem that my colleague Tim Carney lamented about the lack of debate or amendments for bills such as the border deal. Members of both parties have become lazy, unwilling to fight for what they believe in and instead trying to slap together various unrelated topics so they don’t have to defend their own ideas or persuade anyone of anything but to meet deadlines.
Yes, stand-alone funding for Israel doesn’t include immigration policy or mosque security funding. Those should be debated, too, on their own merits. In other words, politicians in Washington, D.C., should do their jobs.