Staff Reports
House Speaker Mike Johnson urged President Biden and Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer to think about a law that would make the White House keep giving weapons to Israel, despite Mr. Biden’s threat to veto the law. Mr. Schumer said on Wednesday that he wouldn’t let the bill go to the Senate floor, which made Mr. Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, very upset.
Mr. Johnson said it was a “bold political” choice by President Biden and Mr. Schumer to try to stop the law. He and others who disagree with Mr. Biden’s plan to pause giving weapons to Israel think it’s a way for Mr. Biden to get more votes from people who don’t like how he’s dealing with the fighting between Israel and Hamas.
“They’ve been making Iran happy and saying bad things about Israel, and now they’re trying to make a group of people who want to help Hamas happy,” said Mr. Johnson. “That’s what’s really going on here.”
Later on Thursday, the House was going to vote on the Israel Security Assistance Support Act from a Republican named Rep. Ken Calvert from California, even though most Democrats in the House were going to vote against it.
House Democrats say that the Republican Party is just using the bill to play politics, and that it won’t actually help Israel or give them new weapons or aid. They think it will only make it harder for Mr. Biden to make decisions about what to do in other countries.
But not all Democrats are against the bill, and some might vote with the Republicans. The fighting in the Democratic Party about how Mr. Biden is handling the conflict could make it so that some Democrats vote for the bill.
The reason for the vote on Thursday is that Mr. Biden said he might stop giving Israel weapons if Israel’s leader, Mr. Netanyahu, doesn’t change how he’s dealing with a city called Rafah. Rafah is where over 1 million Palestinian people live. Mr. Biden already didn’t send thousands of bombs to Israel.
Mr. Johnson said it was a big change from just a few months ago when both Mr. Biden and Mr. Schumer said they would give Israel their full support. “This is a very bad choice that will affect the whole world,” Mr. Johnson said. “It is obviously being done for political reasons, and we can’t let it happen.”
