Republicans Are Lying About Biden’s Big-Bomb Freeze
Plus: Impeachment via ‘your rules.’
It’s a great morning for people who like to confidently assert that polling is broken, and a grim morning for Biden fans who aren’t so sure. The latest New York Times/Siena poll, out today, finds grisly news for the president across the board:
Donald J. Trump leads President Biden in five crucial battleground states, a new set of polls shows, as a yearning for change and discontent over the economy and the war in Gaza among young, Black and Hispanic voters threaten to unravel the president’s Democratic coalition . . .
The findings are mostly unchanged since the last series of Times/Siena polls in battleground states in November. Since then, the stock market has gained 25 percent, Mr. Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan has started, and the Biden campaign has unleashed tens of millions of dollars in advertisements across the battleground states.
The polls offer little indication that any of these developments have helped Mr. Biden, hurt Mr. Trump or quelled the electorate’s discontent. Instead, the surveys show that the cost of living, immigration, Israel’s war in Gaza and a desire for change continue to be a drag on the president’s standing. While Mr. Biden benefited from a burst of momentum in the wake of his State of the Union address in March, he continues to trail in the average of national and battleground state polls.
That last battleground tranche of Times/Siena polls was six months ago. The 2024 election is six months away. Happy Monday.
Republicans’ Baseless ‘Embargo’ Talk
Congressional Republicans have adopted a new line of attack against President Biden. They say he’s imposing an “arms embargo” on Israel.
On Thursday, shortly after the administration confirmed that it had paused a shipment of large bombs to Israel, Senate Republicans held a press conference to denounce the move. “Here’s what Joe Biden has done since October 7,” said Sen. Tom Cotton, leading off the event. “Sanctions for Israelis and an arms embargo on Israel. Sanctions relief and the end of an arms embargo on Iran.”
Right-wing media joined in the attack. The Wall Street Journal titled its editorial, “Biden Slaps an Arms Embargo on Israel.”
The accusation is bogus, and Cotton’s reference to Iran shows why. A Congressional Research Service report on the Iran embargo, published four years ago, detailed the breadth of that term as applied to the Islamic Republic. The report noted that the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action barred “the transfer of arms” to Iran. The report also cited a U.N. resolution that banned the provision of “any battle tanks, armoured combat vehicles, large calibre artillery systems, combat aircraft, attack helicopters, warships, missiles or missile systems” to Iran.
Biden’s recent decision on Gaza is nothing like that. “We have paused one shipment of weapons,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Thursday. “It consists of 1,800 2,000-pound bombs and 1,700 500-pound bombs. We are especially focused on the end use of the 2,000-pound bombs and the impact they could have in dense urban settings.”
John Kirby, the White House national security spokesman, added: “There is no weapons shipment cut-off here. What we have done today is pause the delivery shipment of 2,000-pound bombs.” Kirby explained that the restriction applied to “a particular type of operation in a particular place”—a prospective all-out Israeli attack on Rafah, a city in Gaza where more than a million Palestinian residents and refugees are cornered.
In a CNN interview on Thursday, Biden specified that Israel’s recent military incursions around Rafah were fine, because “they haven’t gotten into the population centers.” And he repeated that the United States would “continue to make sure Israel is secure in terms of Iron Dome and their ability to respond to attacks” such as those from Iran. Jean-Pierre pointed out:
The United States has surged billions of dollars in security assistance to Israel since the Oct. 7 attacks, passed the largest-ever supplemental appropriation for emergency assistance to Israel, led an unprecedented coalition to defend Israel against [Iran’s] attacks . . . We just approved the latest tranche of foreign military financing, which is $827 million worth of weapons and equipment for Israel. . . . We are going to make sure every dollar of the appropriations that is coming out of the national security supplemental indeed gets to Israel.
Did these clarifications chasten Cotton? Not a bit. On Sunday, in an interview with Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation, he brushed the details aside and repeated his smear against Biden:
Cotton: He’s imposed a de facto arms embargo on Israel . . .
Brennan: They’re sending weapons this weekend. That’s not an arms embargo.
Cotton: He just said last week that he’s not going to send offensive weapons. We have no idea what he’s going to withhold. . . . Joe Biden is out there imposing a de facto arms embargo on Israel, at the same time he’s letting arms embargoes on Iran expire.
Brennan: You know $26 billion in emergency funding was just approved by the president. And there is not an arms embargo on Israel . . . You know that.
Cotton: Joe Biden said last week that he’s going to stop supplying offensive weapons that can be used in an urban setting. That is the only setting in Gaza.
Brennan: If they go into Rafah.
Cotton: That is the only setting in Gaza. And they have to go into Rafah. Joe Biden’s position is de facto for Hamas victory at this point.
Brennan also noted—as Bill Kristol did last week in Morning Shots—that Ronald Reagan and other Republican presidents similarly restricted arms to Israel during previous conflicts. Cotton, in response, pretended that Reagan’s restrictions, unlike Biden’s, didn’t “interfere with Israel’s fighting.”
On ABC’s This Week, House Foreign Affairs Chairman Mike McCaul piled on:
Here’s what I object to, Martha, is to say . . . point blank that we are not going to give weapons to Israel if they invade Rafah. . . . For us to step in and say, “No, you can’t go into Rafah and finish the job,” I think is tantamount to an arms embargo.
McCaul, like Cotton, persists in misrepresenting Biden’s decision on the 2,000-pound bombs. It’s not a refusal to “give weapons to Israel.” And it doesn’t bar Israel from surgical military operations, even in Rafah. A sensible, temporary, conditional, and extremely limited restriction is being hyped as an “embargo.” Don’t fall for it.
—Will Saletan
The ‘Your Rules’ Impeachment Push
Republicans’ exaggerated attacks on Biden’s shift on Israel aren’t stopping with mere rhetoric. On Friday, Florida Rep. Cory Mills filed an article of impeachment against Biden over the episode. His reasoning: Because Democrats impeached Donald Trump over threatening to withhold foreign aid to Ukraine back in 2019, Biden deserves to be impeached for threatening to withhold aid to Israel today.
“Joe Biden is pressuring Israel, our biggest ally in the Middle East, by pausing their funding that has already been approved in the House, if they don’t stop all operations with Hamas. It’s a very clear message, ‘this for that,’” Mills told Fox News last week. “These are the same accusations made against President Trump, which resulted in his impeachment by Democrats. The same must happen for Joe Biden, which is why we’re drawing up articles of impeachment now.”
The comparison with Trump isn’t one Mills made just in passing. He structured the entire article of impeachment around it, with the majority of the text lifted verbatim from Rep. Jerry Nadler’s 2019 impeachment articles of Trump.
Let’s be clear about how wild this comparison is. In 2019, Trump threatened to withhold aid to Ukraine unless Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky agreed to help him dig up dirt on the Biden family—explicitly subordinating America’s foreign policy to a foreign leader agreeing to pick a side in U.S. partisan politics. This was the “quid pro quo” for which Trump was impeached.
Based on that precedent, Mills is trying to argue that making any U.S. aid conditional on anything—any “this for that” at all—is an impeachable offense. Not that Mills thought Trump should’ve been impeached, of course. But Democrats thought he should be, and that’s enough to impeach Biden now.
This is more than just a bad-faith reading of what Biden’s doing with aid paired with an aggressively pro-Israel foreign policy, a la Sen. Cotton and Rep. McCaul above. It’s the latest example of one of the deepest, laziest tendencies rotting the brains of Republicans across Washington and the nation: the reactionary principle of your rules.
Under your rules, Republicans don’t behave as though they need to have any principles of their own to shape their own actions. All they need to do is to hunt down some supposed double standard or overreach on the part of Democrats, then apply it back to them when it’s politically advantageous to Republicans to do so. Trump was impeached for a quid pro quo? Guess we’d better impeach Biden for a quid pro quo. Never mind the fact that any reasonably observant high schooler could sketch out the differences between the two situations: Republicans are just operating under your rules.
—Andrew Egger
Catching up . . .
Trump leads in five key states as young and nonwhite voters express discontent with Biden: New York Times
Biden celebrates ‘infrastructure week’—and hopes voters are listening: Politico
Blinken says U.S. won’t back Rafah incursion without ‘credible plan’ to protect civilians: CBS News
Michael Cohen set to testify in Trump hush money trial: CNN
Gallego places $19 million ad buy in Arizona, the largest of any Senate candidate: New York Times
Psaki’s new book falsely recounts Biden’s watch check in troop ceremony: Axios
Quick Hits
1. Cleaning up after the Cannibal Caucus
Up at the site today, A.B. Stoddard sketches out the grim dynamic of the current U.S. House, where Democrats may be perversely saving Republicans from electoral pain by keeping the chamber from spinning too deeply into chaos:
In addition to being the least productive Congress in our lifetime, the stain this Republican majority has left on the lower chamber will make history. Controlled by a rump group of whiners and drama queens, it has functioned only with the good faith of the minority, the enemy—Democrats. Throughout nearly eighteen months of chronic chaos, infighting, and gridlock, on every consequential bill—from funding the government to raising the debt ceiling to FISA reform and foreign aid—Democrats have provided votes when Republican leaders didn’t have them.
At every turn the Democrats could have sat on their hands and let McCarthy and Johnson and their Cannibal Caucus own it. But every time they instead stepped in to clean up a mess.
The Republican nihilists have repeatedly refused to cooperate or compromise on critical legislation, then lambasted their leaders as the “uniparty” for relying on votes from the Democrats.
2. ‘a startling demographic milestone’
The Wall Street Journal notes a startling fact: “Sometime soon, the global fertility rate will drop below the point needed to keep population constant. It may have already happened.”
They go on:
Fertility is falling almost everywhere, for women across all levels of income, education and labor-force participation. The falling birthrates come with huge implications for the way people live, how economies grow and the standings of the world’s superpowers.
In high-income nations, fertility fell below replacement in the 1970s, and took a leg down during the pandemic. It’s dropping in developing countries, too. India surpassed China as the most populous country last year, yet its fertility is now below replacement.
“The demographic winter is coming,” said Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, an economist specializing in demographics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Cheap Shots
These newsletters are becoming evergreen (no offense Bill and Andrew, the news is perverse).
Republicans lie about everything.
The media titters about it. So clever!
The polls compare lies to truth, and lies win, surprising nobody.
Chaos in the Middle East.
Trump puts his diaper on his head and says, "Putin Daddy." The media titters. He's so funny!
It's probably good the Bulwark doesn't cover tech news. I'd have to add the evergreen line of "Google search no longer works but Google denies that." And then something about Elon Musk putting his diaper on his head.
It’s interesting that the Republicans are lying about Biden not sending bombs and weapons to Israel. They suddenly forgot that they delayed approval for the arms shipments for six months. Whose fault was that? The Republicans also lied about immigrants voting, and they are telling everyone that they will not honor the results of the election if they lose, and if they win they will give every pregnant woman in a red state an ankle bracelet so they can monitor where she goes. But still, they lead in the polls???