'Neener-neenerism': Analyst shreds GOP's 'stupid and gross' conditions to fund Israel
House Republicans, lead by newly minted Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), are demanding that the cost of the aid package to Israel be "offset" by $14 billion in cuts to IRS enforcement funding guaranteed in President Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act — which is not only unrelated to the issue at hand, but experts say it would actually increase the deficit.
The fact that Republicans are demanding an increase in tax evasion as their condition of supporting a key U.S. ally's military is not an accident, argued Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall on MSNBC Tuesday, but a sign of how low the GOP has sunk.
"I have to say, Josh, like, Mike Johnson rolling out, going after the IRS on a must-pass is past even a caricature, I can imagine, of a priority from the Republican House speaker," said anchor Chris Hayes. "Were you surprised?"
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"Yeah, I kind of was," said Marshall. "You know, I have pretty low expectations of the new speaker, but you know, the thing that differentiates him from a lot of the Freedom Caucus — he's just as right-wing, he's extremely right-wing, but he's not another one of these Republicans who's, you know, going on Twitter and sharing Pepe the Frog memes, right? He's just a little more genial, he's a little softer. So, I expect that he would try to maybe get past this hurdle a little more gracefully. But as you said, this is kind of like a caricature. It doesn't even save money."
"It's almost, you know, Republicans increasingly, is almost a philosophical basis of this is sort of like neener-neenerism, right?" Marshall continued. "It's just like oh, you want that? You have to make it easier to cheat taxes and we are holding the football, so you've got to come to us."
"Like, it's not even when — it seems stupid and kind of gross in a way that I think a pretty broad cross-section of the electorate would see it that way," added Marshall. "You know, aid for Israel and Ukraine is not just like liberal issue in this country. There's a lot of people who are pretty engaged with this. So, it did surprise me."
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