President Joe Biden urged Congress to pass a $95 billion military aid package that mostly benefits Ukraine — and his pitch was utterly on brand for him.
That means he made it while on vacation and got his facts wrong.
On Sunday, Biden called on Congress, and more specifically the House, to return from a two-week recess that was declared last week and vote on the package that the Senate approved on Tuesday.
According to the Associated Press, about $60 billion of the bill goes to Ukraine to fund its defense against Russia.
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Another $14 billion goes to Israel to assist with its reprisal against Hamas for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack that killed more than 1,200 innocent Jews in Israel. Another $9 billion goes for “humanitarian” aid in Gaza, which conservatives argue will be immediately stolen by Hamas.
Another $8 billion will be spent on Taiwan and other regional allies to help ward off Chinese aggression in the South Pacific.
It’s unclear where the rest of the money — almost $4 billion — goes.
Nonetheless, House Speaker Mike Johnson declared the bill “dead on arrival” in the House because it severed funding for increased border security in the Southwest.
Johnson then set lawmakers free for a two-week winter break.
Biden was in his home state of Delaware when he denounced the House for taking a break.
“The idea that we’re going to walk away from Ukraine, the idea that we’re going to let NATO begin to split, is totally against the interests of the United States of America and it is against our word we’ve given since all the way back to Eisenhower,” Biden told reporters.
“So it’s about time we make sure that Congress come home and pass the legislation funding NATO. It’s critical.”
On Friday, according to Fox News, Biden had told a reporter of the House, “It’s about time they step up, don’t you think?”
“Instead of going on a two-week vacation. Two weeks, walking away. Two weeks? What are they thinking? My God, this is bizarre, and it’s just reinforcing, and it’s just reinforcing all the concern and, and almost I won’t say panic, but real concern about the United States being a reliable ally. This is outrageous.”
The irony, of course, is that Biden himself left Washington for an unspecified period of time to be at home on retreat in Delaware.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that Biden has spent 254 days, or slightly less than a quarter of his presidency, in Delaware.
Overall, the “slacker-in-chief,” as the New York Post dubbed him last year, has taken time off from the White House and his job roughly 40% of his time in office, far and away a record for modern presidents.
Besides the irony of criticizing GOP lawmakers for being on vacation while he was on vacation, Biden also missed the mark on what the money he advocates for will be spent on.
As noted above, Biden said it’s needed for “funding NATO.”
As Trending Politics reported on Sunday, “None of the primary beneficiaries of the Senate’s foreign aid package — Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan — are actually NATO members.”
Suffice it to say that neither is the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, and Biden’s gaffe about “funding NATO” should not be surprising.
As was widely reported in recent days, Special Counsel Robert Hur recently declined to prosecute Biden for clearly violating federal laws governing the handling of classified documents because a sympathetic jury was unlikely to convict a “well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”
Meanwhile, a recent poll revealed that 86% of Americans believe Biden is too old to serve another term in office.
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