America's Talking - Israel Funding Bill Takes Fire, Draws Battle Lines for Johnson Tenure

Episode Date: November 4, 2023

The U.S. House of Representatives is expected to vote as early as Thursday on a controversial spending measure to send funds to Israel and pay for it by cutting from the Internal Revenue Service. The Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act is the most contentious move yet backed by Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., in his new leadership role, a move that President Joe Biden has vocally opposed and which will face significant opposition in the Senate. Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/america-in-focus/support Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Greetings and welcome to America in Focus, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAlo, Vice President of News and Content at the Franklin News Foundation, publisher of the Center Square Newswire Service. Joining me again today is the Center Square's Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief Casey Harper. How are you, Casey? Doing good, Dan. How are you? I am doing well, thank you. We are recording this on Friday, November 3rd.

Casey is the Israeli War Against the Hamas terrorist group in Gaza Rages. U.S. House under New Speaker Mike Johnson, just last night passed a $14.3 billion standalone measure to provide aid to Israel. It's a bit controversial because it goes against President Joe Biden's plan. Biden wants a package deal that would provide more than $100 billion in funding to both Ukraine and its war with Russia, Israel, and some other efforts. Republicans are growing weary of sending more U.S. taxpayer dollars to Ukraine, so they passed this standalone measure just last night.

Tell us more. Yeah, I mean, this is the new speaker, Mike Johnson, the Republican for Louisiana. This is his first big battle. He did some, you know, he got in after, as we reported and talked about a lot on this podcast, he in over three weeks of a little bit of nonsense and Republican chaos voting for speaker after speaker. He gets in.

He passes some appropriations bills pretty quickly, some, you know, little wins for him. He's trying to fund the government, quote, unquote, the right way through the 12 appropriations bills. instead of these massive continuing resolutions that kind of just buy a little bit more time and run up the debt and run up the deficit. So he's doing that. But there's a few things happening at once. Of course, there's a bit, a lot of pressure to send Israel money.

Israel still has a lot of support in the U.S. Polling shows that Americans are far more sympathetic to Israel, that they are Hamas, even with some of... Everywhere but college campuses, apparently. Everywhere but... No, well, and that's true for a lot of political issues in America, actually. But, you know, people, polling shows that people are a lot more sympathetic to Israel than they are to Hamas, even, you know, giving some of the accusations and questions around how Israel has treated those in Gaza as well as how they're bombing and, you know, civilian casualties in Gaza. Of course, you know, we know that Hamas uses human shields as part of their daily practice. And so it's hard to avoid that. But that's a separate issue. So that's, the Israel thing is happening. Then Ukraine, that war is getting pretty long. and expensive for the U.S. right now. And there's a growing fear of some kind of nuclear retaliation from Russia. Of course, they're a major nuclear power. And so the Republicans are saying,

we need to stop sending so much money to them. And it's not just money because we're actually sending, you know, different military equipment and some of our stockpiles are running low. So the excitement about the Ukraine war is fading. And so, and then the third thing for how to quit more quickly things is because U.S. is so caught up at all these other wars, it could be the perfect time for China to invade Taiwan, which they've wanted to do for a long time. National security experts I talk to say it could happen imminently within the next five years. They could take Taiwan. Taiwan is a small island off the coast of China, but they're a highly developed nation, and they basically make all the computer chips that are in our smartphones and a lot of other

things. And they're very important because of that. And if China took them over, they would have a lot of power over the U.S. economy because Taiwan is so big in the chip manufacturing space, not to mention the impact of war and all that. And then the fourth thing is the border is out of control, which we've talked about on this podcast. It's in total disarray. 10 million people have come in in the last few years. Many of them are terrorists. We don't even know what some of them are doing. Many of them, you know, have really checkered past. And some of those do get turned away, but not all of them. So we've got these four things happening once. Biden says, those put them all in one giant bill over $100 billion, $60 billion for Ukraine, $14 billion for the border, $14.4

for Israel and $2 billion for, you know, Taiwan issue. And I think there's some sympathy and some people in the Senate like that idea. But Mike Johnson is like, no, we're not doing that. We're passing a standalone Israel bill, $14.3 billion. We're going to offset from the IRS, cut the IRS to pay for it, which is directly in the face of what Biden did. he passed $80 billion to audit more Americans just earlier in his administration. So that's what's going on there. So Johnson is doing, hey, we're going to stand alone on this. This is not what Biden wants. But I think he's putting his foot, drawing a line in the sand and saying this is how this new house is going to operate.

And we're not going to be intimidated. We're not going to be pushed around by the Biden administration. He might end up coming around on some of this. And they're going to have to negotiate at some point. But it's interesting to see how Johnson is saying, this is how the house is going to run in my tenure. That is interesting, and that would go against some past speakers. That was one of the, really one of the reasons the former speaker, Mike McCarthy, was ousted, was because of making deals with Democrats in the Biden administration. But Casey, as with all things in Congress,

it passed the House last night, Thursday, November 2nd. What are its prospects in the Senate? Well, I think it's, there has no prospects in the Senate as is. There's a couple reasons for that. One, Johnson, or, you know, this bill is paid for by cutting $14.3 billion from the IRS. But the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, which is a nonpartisan, not the nonpartisan group that tells Congress how much a bill is going to cost and add to the deficit, which is called the CBO. The CBO said, actually, the cuts to the IRS will, because it's. cuts from enforcement will decrease revenue collection over the next 10 years because it'll be fewer people to collect revenue. So it's actually not a cut. It's more expensive to cut this money and they'll add to the deficit almost $27 billion over 10 years. So the effort to cut from the IRS to

pay for this, I think is backfired a little bit because it'll actually be more expensive to cut from the IRS according to CBO. You can debate that, but that CBO is pretty trusted and it's going to be hard to argue with CBO on the Hill. So for that reason, I think even I've even heard from you know, House Republicans like Chip Roy, saying they want to pay for this bill in a different way. Cut in the IRS, it's just not really the way they want to do it. And the second thing is the Senate doesn't really like, they don't want to separate everything out the way that Johnson does. And Biden definitely doesn't want to. So it's not going to go anywhere in the sense of being passed as is, but it is, this is where the negotiations are starting and they're going to have to come somewhere

and meet in the middle. Thank you, Casey. So this is a developing story. We'll continue to cover at thecenter square.com, but we are out of time for Casey Harper. I'm Dan Mc Caleb. Please subscribe. Thank you for listening.