Posted on 08/13/2024 7:18:20 AM PDT by george76
As a senator, Kamala Harris voiced her "unequivocal" support for slashing America's defense budget and "redirecting funding to communities in need." Years later, the vice president and Democratic presidential nominee won't say where she stands on the issue.
Harris in 2020 released a statement addressing an amendment from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) that would have redirected 10 percent of the Pentagon's budget—$74 billion in total—into an annual federal grant program. While Harris voted against the amendment, she assured constituents that her issue was with its specific wording, not its general goal.
"I applaud Senator Sanders and am grateful for all the work that he's done on this amendment," she said at the time. "I unequivocally agree with the goal of reducing the defense budget and redirecting funding to communities in need, but it must be done strategically."
"I remain supportive of the effort and am hopeful that with the benefit of additional time, future efforts will more specifically address these complicated issues and earn my enthusiastic support."
Harris's statement came amid mounting threats in the Middle East. Months before the amendment vote, in February 2020, the terror organization Palestinian Islamic Jihad launched rockets at Israel from the Gaza Strip on a near-daily basis. Now, as Israel continues its war against fellow Gaza-based terror group Hamas, it's unclear whether Harris still believes the Pentagon budget should be slashed.
Both Harris's office and campaign did not respond to requests for comment on Harris's current position. The Washington Post also pressed Harris on the issue in a Sunday editorial, noting that Harris once supported cutting the country’s defense budget. "Is that still her view?" the Post asked.
Harris’s past willingness to scale back American defense spending is likely to raise eyebrows, given the vice president's recent flirtations with radical anti-Israel activists.
Harris engaged last week with the Uncommitted National Movement, a coalition of anti-Israel activists who boycotted President Joe Biden over his support for the Jewish state’s war against Hamas.
When confronted by one of the group’s members during a town hall event in Michigan, Harris reportedly "expressed an openness" to consider one of their key demands: a full-blown embargo on U.S. weapons sales to Israel.
"She said yes, I will meet with you," the group’s founder, Layla Elabed, said in a tweet. "And I understand when she agreed to meet with me, she wasn’t agreeing to an arms embargo, she was agreeing to discuss an arms embargo and discuss a policy that will save lives now in Gaza and hopefully get us to a point where we can put our support behind VP Harris."
Harris’s national security advisor, Phil Gordon, quickly walked that position back after the Democratic nominee came under fire from GOP leaders.
"She does not support an arms embargo on Israel," Gordon wrote on X. "She will continue to work to protect civilians in Gaza and to uphold international humanitarian law."
The Biden-Harris administration has come under intense fire for its decision to freeze and slow-walk American arms deliveries to Israel as it faces down Hamas. American diplomats are using the arms sales as a way to pressure Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu into inking a ceasefire deal with Hamas.
Now that the Dems are in the process of getting WW3 started, I doubt they’ll cut the budget, but who knows.
Kamala and defense spending to protect the safety and
security of American families dont mix....like oil and water.
In 2023 of the Biden/Harris admin, the Pentagon’s military personnel budget was $184 billion, which is the second largest category of spending for the Department of Defense (DoD).
Last year in the Biden/Harris admin, the Pentagon couldn’t properly account for a whopping 61% of its total $3.5 trillion in assets. That figure increased this year, with the department insufficiently documenting 63% of its now $3.8 trillion in assets.
Military contractors possess many of these assets, but to an extent unbeknownst to the Pentagon ........ and to Biden/Harris.
I knew as soon as she ignorantly threatened the war bucks she would get set straight by her handlers.
I’d only agree to cut the defense budget if they put the cut towards the debt which they won’t.
I always wonder why they don’t do a fundraiser every year to help pay off the debt. That’d help a lot. Many rich liberals would participate. Dumb government as always.
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As a senator, Kamala Harris voiced her “unequivocal” support for slashing America’s defense budget and “redirecting funding to communities in need.”
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‘Oddly’, I can find no authority to any said ‘redirect’. Shame we don’t have any opposition party, let alone many bodies in D.C., that follow/adhere/enforce the Constitution (aka ‘Law of the Land’)
I can just hear her say unequivocally in that nasally voice of hers.
Everything she spoke out of Willie’s willy warmer, up until the moment she gets her new talking points, was simply “misspoke.”
Maybe Kamalamomma gets her 10% cut now.
She’d give Ukraine anything it and her globalist masters want her to, cutoff off Israel and continue DEI efforts to rid the military of heterosexual white males
Council of Foreign Relations—FR thread
https://www.cfr.org/article/us-aid-israel-four-charts
Why is there growing public scrutiny of U.S. aid to Israel?
Recent polls suggest that most Americans believe the United States is providing Israel the right amount of, or not enough, support, although U.S. military aid has become increasingly controversial amid the Israel-Hamas war. Israel enjoyed widespread support in the West immediately following Hamas’s surprise terrorist attack on October 7, which included alleged war crimes and atrocities against civilians, but public opinion has shifted in many countries as the civilian death toll has mounted and a majority of Gazan Palestinians remain displaced.
Biden has been an ardent supporter of Israel’s right to self-defense and continues to supply Israel with military aid, but he and some members of the U.S. Congress are concerned about the Benjamin Netanyahu government’s prosecution of the war. In December 2023, as the U.S. Congress debated legislation that included $14 billion in emergency funding for Israel, Biden warned that Israel’s “indiscriminate bombing” of Gaza risked costing Israel its international support. Meanwhile, some Democrat lawmakers sought to condition U.S. aid on commitments from Israel to limit civilian casualties. The same day, the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly for a cease-fire in Gaza, with only 10 of 190 countries, including the United States, voting against the measure.
Prior to the war, the U.S.-Israel relationship had suffered some strains over the rhetoric and policies of Netanyahu’s government, including its plans to curb the Israeli Supreme Court’s powers and its approval of more Jewish settlements in the West Bank—critics say the settlements violate international law and undermine prospects for a future state for Palestinians. The so-called two-state solution has been a long-running U.S. foreign policy goal, including for the Biden administration. Some U.S. lawmakers have raised these criticisms in the debate over U.S. aid to Israel during the war in Gaza.
More broadly, some U.S. and Israeli analysts have said that U.S. aid to Israel should be reevaluated because Israel is now a wealthy country—the fourteenth richest per capita—with one of the most advanced militaries in the world. Unlike Cold War Israel in the 1970s, when large amounts of U.S. aid started to flow, modern Israel is more than capable of providing for its own security, and the U.S. aid unnecessarily distorts the bilateral relationship and the countries’ respective foreign policies, these observers say. “It’s time for an agreed-on path to phase out military aid,” wrote CFR Senior Fellow Steven A. Cook in 2020. “This is not punishment but rather recognition that the United States has been successful in achieving its goal, assistance is not an entitlement, and the United States does not think that annexation [of the West Bank] is in Israel’s interest.”
Martin Indyk, former U.S. ambassador to Israel and current CFR Distinguished Fellow, has also called for reductions in U.S. aid. “The US-Israel relationship would be a lot healthier without this dependence. Time for Israel at 75 to stand on its own two feet,” he wrote on Twitter in June 2023.
Other experts argue that U.S. aid actually weakens Israel’s own defense industrial base while serving primarily as a guaranteed revenue stream for U.S. defense contractors.
On the other hand, supporters of continued aid say that it fosters ongoing, important collaboration between U.S. and Israeli defense industries and experts, and in the end helps the countries counter shared threats in the Middle East, particularly Iran. U.S. aid remains a “vital and cost-effective expenditure” that enhances U.S. national security, and it should not be reduced or conditioned, wrote more than three hundred Republican lawmakers in 2021. Ending U.S. military aid today “would send a message to all of Israel’s enemies that Israel’s greatest friend was stepping away, so they should double down on their plans for more, and more deadly, assaults on the Jewish state,” wrote CFR Senior Fellow Elliott Abrams in September 2023.
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Cutting the budget further means going lover than 3.2% of GDP, and also helps ensure that should there US get in a war, there is a better chance of having America defeated and ideally destroyed - long-time Democrat/Communist goal.
Actually it would be no problem to find 74 billion that could be cut from Defense. But it’s better spent there than on another bs giveaway. No one would ever consider returning it to the taxpayers.
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