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WASHINGTON – House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) plans to push legislation that would provide $17.6 billion in military aid to Israel without offsets or additional aid to Ukraine.
The bill is a departure from Prime Minister Johnson’s previous position that funding for Israel includes a disbursement clause. The bill, which is scheduled to be debated in the House of Representatives next week, omits continuing U.S. aid to Ukraine, a top priority for the Biden administration, which has seen declining support among Republicans.
“The need to support our closest allies in the region and our armed forces has never been more pressing, and many members of the conference are calling for immediate action,” Johnson said in a letter to Republican lawmakers. said.
If the bill passes the House, it would put significant pressure on the Democratic-controlled Senate and President Joe Biden to approve aid to Israel, which has broad bipartisan support. House Republicans have balked at the Senate’s bipartisan border deal, which would link aid for both Ukraine and Israel to changes in immigration policy, and Johnson’s announcement further jeopardizes hopes of passing the Senate deal. It has become.
The Republican-controlled House passed an Israel aid bill last year that provided more than $14 billion in aid to the country after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. The bill was funded by taking back money from the Internal Revenue Service that originally came from the Inflation Control Act, a landmark bill supported by Biden and Democrats. The bill passed mostly along party lines, with a few Democrats reluctantly supporting it.
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If the bill had not included the aid payments provision, it likely would have had significant bipartisan support in the House and been able to force passage in the Senate.
But that offset made the aid bill unpalatable to Senate Democrats, who dismissed it as a “poison pill” and ultimately stalled aid to key U.S. allies. The move also drew criticism from some House Republicans who say a clean bill with no spending cuts should have been passed in the first place. Since then, Congress has yet to pass any legislation to support Israel.
“Given the Senate’s failure to introduce adequate legislation in a timely manner and the dangerous situation Israel currently faces, the House will continue to take the lead. We intend to take up and pass the additional package,” Johnson said in the letter.
The Senate’s response to the clean Israel funding bill is uncertain, as a bipartisan agreement linking aid to Israel and other U.S. allies with changes to border and immigration policies is expected to be announced later this week.
Those talks began four months ago among a small group of bipartisan senators but have been the subject of frequent criticism from House Republicans who have scrutinized the agreements over leaks about immigration policy changes. , claims that its apparent measures are not enough to address the problem. Crisis at the Southern Border.
“The Senate appears poised to finally release the text of a supplemental package after months of closed-door negotiations, but by keeping the House out of negotiations, Senate leadership has been unable to quickly consider any legislation. “We recognize that we have eliminated the border negotiations,” Johnson said in the letter, referring to the border negotiations.
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