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Now that the House finally has a speaker, the Republican majority has an opportunity to at least try to get back to work, tackling priorities the chamber neglected during the 22 days of GOP-imposed chaos. Near the top of the list is a congressional response to international crises involving U.S. allies abroad.
For the White House and the bipartisan leadership in the Senate, there’s a straightforward vision in place: Congress can and should, the argument goes, approve an aid package that includes support for both Israel and Ukraine.
For the Republican majority in the House, it’s quite a bit more complicated. For one thing, GOP leaders in the chamber are determined to separate Israeli and Ukrainian assistance, which necessarily imperils the latter country’s future.
For another, there’s a serious problem with how, exactly, House Republicans are prepared to respond to the Israel-Hamas war. NBC News reported:
In his first major move, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., is using the bipartisan goal of providing aid to Israel to pick a fight with President Joe Biden over his signature achievement. A new bill House Republicans released Monday includes $14.3 billion in emergency funding for Israel while rescinding the same amount of IRS funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, a major climate, health care and tax law Biden signed last year.
Under normal circumstances, Congress would simply recognize the seriousness of the crisis in the Middle East and approve emergency funding without concerns for budget offsets. The post-McCarthy, Johnson-led House Republican conference has instead decided it wants aid to Israel to be budget neutral — by transferring money away from the IRS.
Except that’s ridiculous. For one thing, the funding doesn’t need to be offset. For another, the whole point of budget offsets is to prevent making the deficit worse, and taking money from the IRS necessarily has the opposite of the intended effect.
Indeed, The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein highlighted the fact that the specific provisions of the House GOPs’ bill target, among other things, tax enforcement and IRS operations support.
In other words, House Republicans have effectively declared, “We’ll assist Israel, but only if we can undermine federal law enforcement and help tax cheats in a way that makes the budget deficit bigger.”
It’s likely that GOP leaders are simply playing a tiresome game. They’ll bring this bill to the floor, Democrats will reject its absurdities, and Republican strategists will start preparing attack ads that claim Democrats “voted against assisting Israel during a deadly war.”
But the goal right now shouldn’t be creating fundamentally dishonest fodder for the next election. Rather, Johnson & Co. have a responsibility to work on writing a bill that can pass — and this cynical stunt masquerading as legislation cannot.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Ben Cardin described the IRS provisions as a “poison pill” that would derail the effort. The Maryland Democrat added that House GOP leaders must realize that “they can’t work on a bill just with Republicans.”
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, meanwhile, issued a written statement that read in part, “Politicizing our national security interests is a nonstarter.”
The next steps should come into focus fairly quickly. The House will return to work on Wednesday, at which point the Rules Committee will take up the GOP’s bill. A floor vote is expected before the end of the week.
But stepping back, this is the first real governing test for the new House speaker and the overhauled Republican leadership team. It’s a test Johnson is failing.
This is not the sort of step a governing party would take if it were serious about providing assistance to a foreign ally in the midst of a security crisis. Rather, this is what we’d expect from an unserious party that’s prioritizing partisan games over policymaking.