- Some Republicans are raising the possibility of impeaching Joe Biden.
- Senator Tom Cotton compared Biden’s threat to deny Israel arms to Trump’s first impeachment.
- There are many differences between Biden’s comments and Trump’s handling of aid to Ukraine.
Some Republicans and conservatives are so dismayed that President Joe Biden is threatening to deny Israel offensive weapons that they are raising the specter of impeachment.
“Now some people are saying Joe Biden is doing this to get re-elected, which would be bad enough,” Sen. Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, told reporters at a news conference, criticizing Biden’s comments. Biden. “It would also, I might add, constitute grounds for impeachment by the Democrats’ Trump-Ukraine standard – refusing foreign aid to aid his re-election. Only with Joe Biden, that’s true.”
Biden signaled Wednesday that he had lost patience with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the leadership of his war cabinet in the domestic war against Hamas. He stressed his red line if Israeli forces launch a major invasion of Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, where millions of people are sheltering amid war. Biden said that if such a large invasion occurred, the United States would not provide Israel with “the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities.”
Biden also confirmed that his administration has already delayed sending thousands of bombs. Israel has already entered Rafah, but Biden has called its current level of involvement below his red line.
Republicans fired the president following his warning. Some, including Cotton, have gone so far as to compare his actions to President Trump’s decision to temporarily withhold aid to Ukraine. House Democrats impeached Trump for his actions.
Not everyone is sold. Cotton. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a noted Trump ally, warned that while someone could “make a good argument” for impeachment, that was not their goal.
“I didn’t come here to impeach the president,” Graham, a South Carolina Republican, told reporters at the same news conference. “I came here to let everyone know that we do not agree with this decision.”
It’s worth remembering what exactly got Trump into trouble. There are many differences between then and now.
A government watchdog found that Trump broke the law.
The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan watchdog, formally concluded that the Trump administration violated the law by withholding congressionally approved aid to Ukraine. The watchdog concluded that Trump violated a Nixon-era law by withholding about $214 million in defense aid. The Trump White House disputed the report, but the office remained unmoved in its defense.
“Faithful execution of the law does not permit the President to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted,” the watchdog concluded.
Biden is unlikely to have violated the law if the White House spent congressionally approved aid for Israel by the end of the fiscal year in September, according to a defense policy expert.
“The fact that Congress voted money to support Israel means the president has to spend it,” Mark Cancian, senior adviser at the Washington, DC-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Business Insider. “So basically he’s going to have to spend this money on Israel as Congress has appropriated, but he doesn’t have to do that today.”
Cancian cautioned that the current bomb shipment that Biden has suspended likely has a different deadline, but it is not immediately clear what tranche of money that corresponds to. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, the United States sends about $3.3 billion to Israel annually, mostly in the form of grants that Israel must, in turn, use to purchase American military goods and services.
And it wasn’t just about the letter of the law. One of the House Democrats’ articles of impeachment cited a “corrupt plan or course of action in pursuit of personal political advantage.” Trump’s withholding of aid is not the only offense.
At issue was whether Trump took official action, delaying aid in favor of a private agenda to get the Ukrainian government to help dig up Hunter Biden. Trump’s ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, later confirmed that a quid pro quo had indeed taken place.
Republicans have accused Biden of withholding weapons due to concerns about his re-election. Several Republicans cited the president’s position in Michigan, a swing state, where more than 100,000 people voted “no strings attached” in the state’s Democratic presidential primary as part of a campaign to protest the Biden’s support for Israel.
“Why is he suspended? To appease his liberal base in places like Dearborn, Michigan, because Joe Biden is in trouble in Michigan,” Sen. Steve Daines of Montana, head of the GOP campaign arm, told reporters in the Senate.
Biden has repeatedly expressed concern about civilian deaths during the war. According to Gaza health authorities, around 34,000 people, including many women and children, were killed there. US allies – the UK, France and Germany – have all expressed concern about an invasion of Rafah.
Other presidents have suspended arms deliveries.
President Ronald Reagan blocked the transfer of F-16s to Israel in 1983, while his forces were in Lebanon. He cited the belief that doing so could violate the law, according to the New York Times. President George HW Bush also threatened loan guarantees in 1991 when then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir refused to respect his wishes to limit settlement financing in the occupied territories.
Trump himself was involved in another dispute. His administration has retained an envelope of 105 million dollars to support the Lebanese armed forces. Trump’s delay occurred around the time Congress was already investigating his Ukraine-related actions.
That’s not to say there won’t be costs for Biden.
Biden relied on a bipartisan coalition to pass a $95 billion foreign aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. House Speaker Mike Johnson took a political risk by backing the package with few changes after House conservatives threatened its future if it tried to pass additional aid to Ukraine. (On Wednesday, Johnson easily survived a push by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, to oust him from power.)
Johnson sharply criticized Biden’s decision.
“What the president is doing here is not only defying the will of Congress, we just voted on this several days ago,” Johnson said on CNBC. “But he is also trying, I suppose, to dictate and micromanage the war, the defense effort in Israel, as a condition of providing the weapons that we all know they desperately need.”
That said, while Biden will need bipartisan support to keep the government funded in September, he likely won’t ask for more aid from Ukraine anytime soon.
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