Senate advances aid for Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan, TikTok bill

The Senate advanced a package Tuesday to provide billions in aid to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan, sending the legislation on the path to passage into law after six difficult months of political battles.

In a final score of 80-19, senators passed a crucial procedural vote with broad bipartisan support, signaling that the foreign aid plan has the strength to pass a final vote.

“The hard work of six long months has paid off,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said on the Senate floor after the vote.

Tuesday’s vote also triggers senators’ final debate, which will last up to 30 hours, unless they agree to hold the final vote sooner and resume their usual break.

“I’m asking my colleagues to come together to pass the additional language today as quickly as possible,” Schumer said Tuesday morning before the vote. “Let’s not delay this, let’s not prolong this, let’s not make our friends around the world wait another moment.”

If the Senate formally passes the bill in the final vote, it will then go to President Joe Biden, who has already said he will sign it after the House passed the package as four separate bills on Saturday.

The funding includes about $60 billion for aid to Ukraine, $26 billion for Israel and $8 billion for Taiwan and Indo-Pacific security.

In terms of spending, the legislation is similar to the $95 billion foreign aid bill passed by the Senate in February, which was effectively shelved in the House in the weeks since.

But that bill also contains several other foreign policy proposals, including a measure to force TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell the social media platform, or face a nationwide ban on the app. The provision would give ByteDance nine months to sell, although President Joe Biden could extend that deadline to a year.

TikTok has pushed back on the proposal since the House passed it over the weekend.

A source within the company said TikTok would file a “legal challenge” if the bill were signed into law, according to an internal memo obtained by NBC News.

“It is regrettable that the House of Representatives is using the guise of significant foreign and humanitarian aid to once again pass a ban bill that would trample the free speech rights of 170 million Americans ” a TikTok spokesperson said on Saturday after the passage by the House of Representatives. The law project.

So far this year, TikTok and ByteDance have jointly spent more than $7 million on lobbying and advertising to prevent Congress from passing legislation to force the sale, according to disclosure reports.

The foreign aid program has also been the subject of deep internal bickering in the Republican Party, a key reason why the legislation has been stalled on Capitol Hill since Biden first proposed it in October .

House Republicans like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., have threatened to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., in part for passing this foreign aid, calling it “total betrayal” on

Those political threats, along with a shrinking Republican majority in the House, led Johnson to stall the Senate’s $95 billion foreign aid bill for weeks.

But Johnson moved to end the impasse over foreign aid last week after the attempted attack on Iran on April 13, after which the president faced renewed bipartisan pressure to move forward on the funding.

And despite Rep. Green’s threats, Johnson’s job has some assurance thanks to public support from former President Donald Trump.

“Look, we have a majority of one, okay? It’s not like he can do whatever he wants. I think he’s a very good person,” Trump said in an interview radio show on the John Fredericks Show Monday evening. “I think he’s trying really hard.”