‘Politicizing Aid to Israel’: Biden Threatens to Veto ‘Poison Pill’ Republican Legislation to Strip IRS Funding
AP Photo/Evan Vucci
The White House issued a statement on Tuesday night stating that President Joe Biden would veto an aid package to Israel that also rescinds funding for the Internal Revenue Service.
House Republicans are seeking $14.3 billion in aid to Israel that they claim will be offset by funding that was allocated to the IRS as part of last year’s Inflation Reduction Act. The legislation would pull $14.5 billion in funding from the tax-collecting agency in a move that critics say would actually cost billions more over the long term.
The Democratic-controlled Senate has said the bill would be dead on arrival in the upper chamber due to this provision, as well as the lack of funding for Ukraine, which like Israel, is also at war.
In the statement issued by the Office of Management and Budget, the Biden administration also decried the lack of humanitarian aid for Palestinian civilians in Gaza amid Israel’s ongoing military operations in the territory since Hamas carried out a series of terrorist attacks on Oct. 7.
The statement added:
Moreover, the bill would create a dangerous precedent by demanding partisan poison pill offsets in return for meeting core national security needs of the United States. This bill would break with the normal, bipartisan approach to providing emergency national security assistance by conditioning funding on offsets, politicizing aid to Israel, and treating Israel differently from our other allies and partners. And that new and damaging precedent would have devastating implications for our safety and alliances in the years ahead. The egregiousness of this particular offset is it adds to the deficit and would help some wealthy individuals and large corporations cheat on their taxes.
It concluded, “If the President were presented with this bill, he would veto it.”
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and House Republicans have taken heat from the left over the gambit.
“I’ve never, truly, heard of a dumber plan to start a speakership than to put Jews’ lives in danger so you could protect billionaire tax cheats,” MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said on Tuesday.
