President Joe Biden said Wednesday he strongly supports a proposal from Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson to provide aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, sending crucial bipartisan support to the precarious effort to approve $95 billion in funding for the U.S. allies this week.
Before potential weekend voting, Johnson was facing a choice between potentially losing his job and aiding Ukraine. He notified lawmakers earlier Wednesday that he would forge ahead despite growing anger from his right flank. Shortly after Johnson released the aid proposals, the Democratic president offered his emphatic support for the package.
“The House must pass the package this week, and the Senate should quickly follow,” Biden said. “I will sign this into law immediately to send a message to the world: We stand with our friends, and we won’t let Iran or Russia succeed.”
After agonizing for days over how to proceed on the package, Johnson pushed ahead on a plan to hold votes on three funding packages — to provide about $61 billion for Ukraine, $26 billion for Israel and $8 billion to allies in the Indo-Pacific — as well as several other foreign policy proposals in a fourth bill. The plan roughly matches the amounts that the Senate has already approved.
Something to note about the Ukraine aid; the largest single portion of it is a multi-billion dollar payment to the DoD for backfilling stock.
So by denying this aid they’re not simply denying Ukraine aid, they’re also standing in the way of our own military’s readiness.
They’re also delaying the orders to the US factories that make those arms. Most of the aid money goes to companies/workers in in Maryland, Virginia, California, and Alabama to make the things we’re backfilling. Since the Rs would also like to trigger a recession before November, I suspect this has been part of their reasoning.
Removed by mod
Absolutely not. We must push this further, every year we need older and older candidates. I want to defy God and enthrone a leader who will live longer than Abraham.
Vote for Immortal Mummy 2024!
I would totally vote for dear mummy!
For the Emperor! For the Golden Throne!
I do, constantly.
Plus it makes no sense to talk about age in this case, Biden isn’t the one holding this up, it’s house GOP…
Woah he actually did his job?
I thought he was going full obstructionist. The guy can eat shit but at least now I’m not freshly pissed off at him.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Johnson is also proposing that $9 billion of economic assistance for Kyiv be structured as forgivable loans, along with greater oversight on military aid, but the decision to support Ukraine at all has angered populist conservatives in the House and given new energy to a threat to remove him from the speaker’s office.
It includes legislation to allow the U.S. to seize frozen Russian central bank assets to rebuild Ukraine; to place sanctions on Iran, Russia, China and criminal organizations that traffic fentanyl; and to potentially ban the video app TikTok if its China-based owner doesn’t sell its stake within a year.
Sen. Maria Cantwell, the Democratic chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, said in a statement she was “very happy” that the House bill had extended the time period for ByteDance to sell TikTok.
At the same time, the speaker’s office was tidying up after Johnson said on Fox News that he and Trump were “100% united” on the big agenda items, when in fact the Republican presidential nominee, who had just hosted the House leader in a show of support, opposes much overseas aid as well as a separate national security surveillance bill.
Johnson told CNN on Wednesday that he thought Trump, if elected president, would be “strong enough that he could enter the world stage to broker a peace deal” between Ukraine and Russia.
The House’s version of the aid bill pushes the Biden administration to provide long-range ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile Systems) to Ukraine, which could be used to target Russian supply lines.
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