Nov 3, 2023
New Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson gets caught for blatant hypocrisy after forcing biased aid package for Israel that would cut funding for the IRS, provide no Ukraine aid and is likely doomed in a Senate vote. Rayyvana and Brett Erlich break it down on The Damage Report.
- 10 minutes
As Israel begins the next phase of its
war, it's been kind of disturbing to us.
I've heard Democrats suggest that
there needs to be a ceasefire.
Let us be clear we've been
very clear about this.
There was a ceasefire.
It was before October 7, and Hamas broke
it, and Israelis suffered unspeakable acts
[00:00:15]
of evil, as you've heard,
even recounted here this morning.
Israel doesn't need a ceasefire.
It needs its allies to cease with the
politics and deliver support now, all and
that's what we're doing.
House Republicans plan to do that.
>> Speaker 2: I really can't imagine
a more horrific and callous way to talk
[00:00:34]
about what is the most urgent humanitarian
crisis in the world, but he did it.
There he was, the newly elected
speaker of the House, Mike Johnson,
saying that Israel needs its allies to,
quote,
cease with the politics, which is so
ironic considering what we're gonna
[00:00:50]
get into in the details of what
the Republicans were doing.
But he's claiming that the Republicans
are the ones who are gonna cease with
the politics.
Let's look at how that actually
panned out in reality where we live,
and apparently the Republicans do not
on Thursday passed a bill that would
[00:01:09]
tie $14.3 billion in military aid for
Israel to domestic spending cuts.
Republicans pushed through the measure on
a mostly party line, not entirely, though.
A vote of 200 excuse me, in 26 to 196,
which is extremely rare for
[00:01:28]
an Israeli aid package which normally
enjoys broad bipartisan support.
Now, all but
12 Democrats opposed this legislation.
There was also two Republicans
who opposed this legislation,
that was Marjorie Greene and
Thomas Massey.
[00:01:45]
Let's get into some of the facts
of what was in this bill.
A divided House on Thursday passed
a Republican written bill that would tie
$14.3 billion in military aid for Israel
to domestic spending cuts and provide no
money for Ukraine, defying President Biden
and dooming its chances in the Senate.
[00:02:04]
Mr Biden has requested such a package,
totaling $105 million.
And White House officials said on Tuesday
that he would veto the House bill
because it was limited to Israel and
contained partisan poison pill offsets.
Although he probably won't have to veto it
because it's not going to pass the Senate,
[00:02:23]
it's not expected to pass in the Senate.
So what are those poison pills?
What was included in this package?
The bulk of the money in the GOP measure
would go toward helping Israel replenish
and bulk up its weapons systems,
including $4 billion for the Iron Dome and
[00:02:41]
David Sling missile defense systems.
It also includes 200 million for
the protection of United States
personnel and evacuation of US citizens.
It leaves out humanitarian aid for Gaza,
which Mr Biden has requested and
many Democrats regard as crucial.
[00:03:01]
Now, as we've previously reported,
they're also using this package
as a means to help out their wealthy
donors and slash IRS funding.
To pay for the bill, House Republicans
have attached provisions that would
cut billions from the IRS that
Democrats approved last year and
[00:03:19]
Biden signed into law as
a way to go after tax cheats.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget
Office says doing that would end up
costing the federal government
a net 12.5 billion.
I'm gonna say that number again
12.5 billion because of lost
[00:03:35]
revenue from tax collections.
Now out of step with Mitch on Ukraine but
Johnson says it's coming in
another likely horrendous package,
a little more from that
New York Times article.
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the
minority leader, said on Tuesday that he
[00:03:55]
and Mr Schumer were conceptually on the
same page when it came to linking aid for
Ukraine, Israel,
the southern border and Taiwan.
Mr Johnson said on Thursday that he
intended to attach legislation to
deal with immigration at the southern
border with aid for Ukraine.
[00:04:12]
Bret, obviously this is dead in the water.
Biden said he's gonna veto it strong
indications it's not gonna pass in
the Senate.
But I can't get over the irony and the
sheer hypocrisy of Mike Johnson to go and
do that press conference where he says
now is not the time for politics.
[00:04:29]
While he mean [LAUGH] it's an absurd
thing to say on his face but
I mean he's using this Israel aid
package to scratch the backs of
his wealthy donors and for
Republicans to do the politics that
they've wanted to do for
a long time and defund the IRS.
[00:04:49]
>> Speaker 3: Yeah so they're back baby.
The Republicans are back doing
the most Republican thing ever.
It's this evangelical coalition that
uses people like Mike Johnson as
a way to kind of placate their wildly
Christian evangelical base play
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to their best hopes for the world,
which is an apocalypse.
Thanks to my people living kind of near
where all their nativity scenes are.
And then after know in the meantime,
as they're all placated and hopped up
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on dreams of the apocalypse and the return
of the second coming of Jeezy crazy.
Then at the same time the Republicans
who are pretending to be these fiscal
conservatives are actually just shutting
off the machine that gathers tax
[00:05:36]
revenue to offset the deficit
which they say they hate.
So they are just turning off
various spigots that fund
the government that close the deficit,
that reduce our blunder
into eventually being like
a shell corporation for China or
[00:05:55]
whatever you wanna call it in the ways
that they conduct their business.
>> Speaker 2: And it's funny are we
need to cut spending Republicans, right?
And that line of messaging is
necessitated on their base never peering
[00:06:11]
behind the curtain, even a shred to
see what that actually means and
how it plays out in reality, right?
Because if you do, if you just look
a little bit further into this,
they're cutting spending, but
costing billions of dollars and doing it.
[00:06:28]
And it's funny the things that they say
that we need to cut spending across
the board, but then you hear everyone
in Republican leadership talking about,
well, while we're passing these
funding bills for defense,
we also need to further
fund border security.
[00:06:44]
And that was the whole thing
with the passing the budget.
We need to slash the budget, but
massively increase the money going to our
southern border, going to Ice,
going to Customs and Border Protection.
It's such a disingenuous line from them,
and
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it just continues to amaze
me that people buy into it.
But of course, I have to be realistic
about the fact that not everyone
is degenerate in their participation and
observing of politics
as we are most people.
[00:07:16]
It's a passive process, I don't know.
Any last thoughts before we get
into the next section of this.
>> Speaker 3: Yeah, as there's
more people that are kind of going
away from the Republican neocon approach,
right?
[00:07:33]
There's a lot more people
that are gonna defect.
And especially in the House
of Representatives,
you only need like four to eight more
defectors than the ones they already have
on this funding bill to kind of take
another step in the utter realignment of
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partisan politics in America.
And I think there's a lot of
ways that the Israel Palestine
thing has been characterized.
And usually I don't know how much of
a difference anyone's really gonna make,
[00:08:04]
but it helps to look at it certain ways,
different ways at different times.
And I don't know, it would take
too long to kind of describe it,
but the most pro Israel approach
I have to a ceasefire is this.
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If you take yourself from the Israeli
perspective and Hamas and the surrounding
Arab nations want to wipe you off the map,
the big mistake you can make is to over
exert yourself in the wake of an attack
that puts you at the moral high ground.
[00:08:39]
And every passing day
that Netanyahu does it,
you eliminate some of the stuff
that Johnson is saying here, like,
in the wake of it, if you're Biden in
the counterattack to the incursion,
the attack on October 7,
you have to go hug Benjamin Net and Yahoo.
[00:08:58]
This is politically speaking, you have to
support your allies in the time where they
just had, like something per capita on
the order of 20 911, you have to do that.
But the more that Benjamin Net and
Yahoo systematically just
disproportionately destroys Gaza,
you lose supporters,
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you lose the moral high ground,
you lose the rhetorical war.
And the more you do that,
you're gonna lose dollar bills in
support of what you've been doing.
And the question is, does
Benjamin Netanyahu be like, all right,
[00:09:32]
give me two more weeks to destroy all
of Gaza, or do I just kind of say,
okay, ten to one,
we did ten times as many?
Is that his rhetorical high ground to say,
like, Israel is still strong.
>> Right, absolutely.
And we're gonna talk a little bit about
the changing public opinion on supplying
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military aid to Israel,
as well as support for
a ceasefire that's absolutely impacted by.
I mean, just the utter atrocities,
the images which are I think, and
maybe Israel overplayed its hand
because they are not taking into effect
the mass spread of the images that
social media makes available and
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the mobilization that has done
particularly to younger generations.
And brought people who previously
would have no knowledge on what's
going on there into activism over this,
convincing people to hit the streets.
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Episode
Podcast
The Damage Report: November 3, 2023
Hosts: Rayyvana Guests: Brett Erlich
- 7 minutes