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 [00:05:05] 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 [00:05:21] 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 [00:07:01] 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 [00:07:48] 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. [00:08:22] 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, [00:09:17] 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 [00:09:49] 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 [00:10:08] 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. [00:10:25] [MUSIC]