We always knew this, but now there is no further doubt: Today’s Democrat Party is a congregation of slaves devoted to the federal government’s perpetual expansion at the expense of every other consideration.
And that certainly includes Israel, amid a war foisted upon it by the Democrats’ friends among the Palestinian Arabs and their Iranian backers.
There is a bill to provide some $15 billion in aid for Israel now moving through Congress. But new House Speaker Mike Johnson did something interesting with it. (READ MORE from Scott McKay: Here’s to You, Cornel West and Dean Phillips!)
He tied the appropriation for Israel aid to a corresponding cut — namely, to the $80 billion funding increase for the IRS that the Democrat-led House passed in the dying throes of the last Congress.
This, we’re told, was a colossal mistake on Johnson’s part:
Johnson has made a “huge and consequential blunder” by tying additional U.S. aid for Israel to a cut in Internal Revenue Service (IRS) funding, according to a senior Democratic-leaning political strategist.
On Monday, House Republicans introduced a bill that would provide an additional $14.3 billion in aid to Israel which is currently fighting Hamas, in exchange for an IRS funding cut of the same value. Spending on the IRS was beefed up in 2022 as part of President Biden’s flagship Inflation Reduction Act, which also substantially increased investment in green energy.
President Biden has requested $106 billion from Congress, $61.4 billion of which would go to Ukraine, $14.3 billion to Israel, 13.6 billion to secure the U.S.-Mexico border, with the remainder for Taiwan and other humanitarian work including in Israel, Gaza, and Ukraine. However, Republicans in the House—some of whom oppose any additional aid to Ukraine—instead introduced the standalone bill offering financing for Israel in return for IRS cuts.
Oh, yeah — they really, really don’t like this:
The New Speaker, Mike Johnson, is working hard for the wealthy donor class already. He wants to condition aid to Israel on slashing the same amount from the IRS budget—because the Uber wealthy don’t like how that agency is now far better at collecting taxes they owe. Don’t play…
— George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) October 31, 2023
Huge and consequential blunder by the new Speaker right out of the box. https://t.co/CPyvxBELOa
— Simon Rosenberg (@SimonWDC) October 30, 2023
House GOP’s price for helping Israel: making it easier for rich people to cheat on their taxes https://t.co/wtzZmHHvfy
— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) October 30, 2023
So, is the bill really a “huge and consequential blunder”?
There are two issues at play here.
First is the idea that the House would refuse to dance to Joe Biden’s tune and vote on the entire $100 billion appropriation, which would lump aid for Israel with aid for Ukraine and some $14 billion for border security. Johnson and the House leadership opted to split Biden’s package into component parts, something that is entirely consistent with a promise he’s made not to force omnibus-style spending bills down House members’ throats.
According to Mitch McConnell, doing business that way is a mistake:
.@LeaderMcConnell: “At the risk of repeating myself, the threats facing America and our allies are serious and they’re intertwined. If we ignore that fact, we do so at our own peril.”
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell insisted he wants to keep military aid to Ukraine and… pic.twitter.com/Q7AVUZx7hG
— The Hill (@thehill) October 31, 2023
A much more successful Republican congressional figure disagrees:
Speaker Mike Johnson made exactly the right decision to bring up the aid for Israel by itself without tying it to anything else. It is also very encouraging that he is going to offset the aid for Israel with spending cuts to start cutting the deficit and fighting inflation. Great…
— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) October 30, 2023
The question that interests me most on the severability of these aid packages is: Why don’t McConnell and the others believe that Congress can pass Israel and Ukraine aid separately?
And if both are good ideas, why isn’t it smart politics to vote on them separately and take double the credit for good votes?
One other question: Why does border-security funding have to be bound up in Israel and Ukraine aid? Why is it thrown in as a sweetener?
Of course, you know why. The border money is thrown in because, if you’re in Congress and you take the position that enforcing our border is a higher national priority than propping up Ukraine for its endless war (and why are there no peace negotiations aimed at ending that stalemate, again?), then you’re now put to the question. If you don’t vote for Ukraine, then you also don’t vote for the border. And, as a special bonus, you also don’t support Israel.
It’s a very typical dirty trick, and it’s the kind of crappy politics that Washington is known and hated for. It’s a classic example of why omnibus bills absolutely, positively ought to be banished to the ash-heap of history.
So Johnson and the GOP leadership offered a dirty trick of their own. Rather than jacking up his own members by demanding they vote for Ukraine or else be accused of failing to stand for an orderly southern border, he’s jacking up Democrats and the D.C. uniparty crowd by demanding that they pay for this foreign aid with domestic cuts.
And $15 billion in IRS swag is the easiest place to find the money.
Nobody really believes that the IRS would use that $15 billion to go after the rich. That money funds efforts to audit and harass the middle class and, in particular, small businesses. Everybody knows this.
So he’s now smoked out the fact that Democrats have absolutely zero interest in fiscal sanity and, furthermore, are unwilling to prioritize Israel over the expansion of the IRS’s capability to bludgeon average Americans who can’t afford white-shoe tax attorneys.
And the screeching this has engendered is really something:
House Republicans are now putting conditions on US support for Israel.
They are playing political games with Israel’s security and democracy around the world.
That’s what happens when you choose a Speaker whose primary “qualification” is trying to overturn a fair election.
— Daniel Goldman (@danielsgoldman) October 31, 2023
Aid for Israel paid for by a trim-down in the growth of the federal government is now “conditional” aid. Got that?
Why isn’t Dan Goldman willing to slow the growth of the IRS so that the USA can come to Israel’s rescue with that $15 billion? Shouldn’t this be a no-big-deal consideration?
And why is it a “huge and consequential blunder” to ask the federal government to find the money to pay for Israel aid?
Or is it OK to do so, but you just can’t find the money in the IRS budget? If that’s the case, then what other trees would Democrats accept being shaken to find that $15 billion?
Because if the answer to that question is “none,” then we’re being told that Mike Johnson makes mistakes when he seeks to limit any expansion of the federal government at all in cases where special appropriations are to be made. He’s supposed to not just accede to more and more inflationary, ruinous borrowing — he has to champion it.
Either that or he makes “huge and consequential blunders.”
The American people are not going to tolerate this level of stupid propaganda for very long.
I was at a lunch on Tuesday with a prominent real estate developer. He was telling me that commercial real estate in America is on the precipice of utter disaster thanks to a combination of factors, from remote work to inner-city (read: downtown) crime and, especially, through-the-sky interest rates as an effort to slow inflation. He said that office-building owners are hemorrhaging tenants, and it’s chaos dealing with the banks as adjustable-rate loans get more and more prohibitive and owners of those buildings dump them at a loss just to stop the bleeding.
Which means that institutional investors like BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard are getting richer while local investors and mid-size players in real estate markets take a bath. And what’s driving all of this, at the end of the day, is out-of-control, insane, inflationary federal spending and the Fed’s vain efforts to stave off its consequences.
Americans love Israel. We don’t love the IRS. Most Americans would be more than happy to see, as a “condition” of helping Israel, the budget of that IRS grow only by $65 billion rather than the full $80 billion Team Biden demanded and got last year before Johnson became Speaker.
So if this is a “huge and consequential blunder,” then perhaps he can be forgiven.
His Democrat tormentors in the political and media class? Perhaps not so much.
