The standoff continues. The American House of Representatives stumbled, Tuesday, February 6, on an envelope of 17.6 billion dollars (nearly 16.5 billion euros) for Israel which Joe Biden opposed, the American president demanding that these funds be coupled with aid for Ukraine.
The Republicans in Congress and the Democratic leader are engaged in a skirmish over American aid to these two countries. Conservative parliamentarians, in the majority in the House and mostly close to Donald Trump, want at all costs to release new funds for Israel, a historic ally of the United States, at war against Hamas. But many of them oppose the validation of new funds for kyiv, believing that it is not up to the American taxpayer to finance a conflict which is getting bogged down.
Aware that the sense of urgency has faded in Washington since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Joe Biden has been demanding since October that the envelopes for the two countries appear within the same project of law. An idea that many Republicans oppose.
The vote on Israel, called by conservatives in the House of Representatives on Tuesday, was a way of trying to force the president’s hand. In vain. To be approved, this bill would have had to be voted on by the House of Representatives and the Senate and then signed into law by the president. However, most Democrats were against this text. Joe Biden had already warned that he would veto it if it was adopted.
Biden accuses Trump of manipulation
Furthermore, the American president attacked Donald Trump head-on on Tuesday, whom he accused of manipulating the Republican Party to block any reform of migration policy and any new aid to Ukraine. “Donald Trump prefers to exploit this issue [de l’immigration] rather than resolve it,” declared the Democratic president during a speech from the White House.
A spokesperson for the former president, Joe Biden’s very likely rival in the November presidential election, denounced a “blatant lie”, saying in a statement that Donald Trump had “created the most secure border in history, and [that] it was Joe Biden who reversed his decisions, spreading death, destruction and chaos” across the country.
At stake: a reform project blocked by the opposition, which provides for more police at the borders, stricter asylum procedures, and which gives the power to the president to simply close the border with Mexico, in the event of Migrant arrivals above a certain threshold. This bill, painfully negotiated for weeks by senators from both camps, also depends on the resumption of American military assistance to Ukraine, interrupted since the end of December, and any new aid to Israel.
“It’s time to show some courage.”
“Supporting this bill means opposing Putin. To oppose it is to play into the hands of the Russian president, the democrat said. Joe Biden has asked for around $60 billion for Ukraine, and $14 billion for Israel. He will only have them if the Senate, then the House of Representatives, which together make up Congress, vote on the text. But to hear the Republican leaders, who have a blocking minority in the Senate and who have the majority in the House, this has no or almost no chance of happening, they who are calling for a toughening of immigration policy.
The American executive argues, for its part, that the text received the support of a border police union, which judges that it is “not perfect”, but that the reform is better than a “ status quo “. This same union, underlined Joe Biden, had called to vote for Donald Trump in 2020. The Democratic president hopes to turn this opposition from the right in his favor.
“Every day between now and November, Americans will know that if the border is not secure, it is only because of Donald Trump,” he said. “It is time for Republican parliamentarians to show a little courage” against the former president, he demanded.