Senate Republicans are in search of legislative tools to force President Joe Biden to relinquish his threat of withholding U.S. military aid to Israel amid heightened tensions with the ally over its war in Gaza.
Biden is vowing to halt a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs in an effort to influence Israel not to launch a new military offensive in Rafah over concerns about more civilian casualties in the densely populated Gaza city home to more than 1 million civilians and refugees.
“We can’t let this pass without some pushback,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).
He is leading the charge among GOP senators, whose frustration over Biden’s handling of the foreign policy situation that they say undermines Congress pans across the party’s ideological spectrum from moderates to conservatives.
“The [administration] did not inform the Appropriations Committee,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), a centrist senator who is the ranking member of the panel, said. “They did not inform the Foreign Relations Committee. They did not inform the Armed Relations Committee. It was a unilateral decision.”
Biden’s move comes after Congress approved a foreign aid package in April that included fresh military aid for Israel and humanitarian relief for Gazans that capped off months of delay and bitter political feuds.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was incremental in garnering GOP support for the legislation.
“The president of the United States will be forced to choose between his supposedly ‘ironclad’ commitment to an ally under attack and the will of his leftist political base,” McConnell said. “And because they bet that the president would choose the latter, well, it would seem that Hamas bet correctly.”
As Senate Republicans pushed a resolution to condemn Biden’s hold on the U.S. weapons, they accused the president of prolonging Israel’s war against Hamas and aiding the terrorist group. Some view holding back support as a betrayal and in violation of the legislation passed by Congress.
“Joe Biden object objectively favors a Hamas victory over Israel” by threatening military aid, said Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR). “It’s just that simple.”
Graham feared that the president’s actions could have the adverse effect of saving innocent lives and make it more difficult to retrieve hostages still in the grips of Hamas.
“What you’re doing is you’re saying, ‘Hamas has put Palestinians in the crosshairs of Israel, so stand Israel down.’ That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my friggin’ life,” the frustrated senator told reporters. “You tell the person who’s about to be wiped off the map, ‘You got to slow down because your enemy is making it hard on the Palestinian people to survive because they choose to put them in harm’s way’? That is ass backwards.”
Republicans accused Biden of committing an offense former President Donald Trump was impeached for when he withheld Ukraine aid amid pressuring the foreign power to investigate the Biden family, who was his political opponent.
“They’re not going to get our support if in fact they go on these population centers,” Biden said of Israel in a CNN interview that aired Wednesday night.
He said the United States will “continue to make sure Israel is secure” with defense weapons such as for the Iron Dome missile system but not those that could be used by the ally for an offensive operation in Rafah.
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Graham contrasted Biden’s efforts to influence Israel with the way the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians without first seeking the approval of any foreign governments.
“Should we have done that? Yeah, I think we should. We saved a million Americans from having to go and invade Japan. So, no, Israel’s actions are not my problem. My problem is the equivocation by this administration to allow them to get on with doing this,” Graham said. “If somebody had told us ‘you’re doing too much to destroy Germany and Japan’ after what they did, it would have fallen on deaf ears.”
