House Votes Unanimously to Condemn China Over Spy Balloon, New York Times, Feb. 9, 2023.
By Karoun Demirjian
The vote came after Republican leaders rebuffed a right-wing effort to formally rebuke President Biden for the episode, part of an effort to keep partisanship out of China policy.
The House on Thursday issued a bipartisan condemnation of the Chinese Communist Party for flying a spy balloon over the United States last week, unanimously approving the measure after top Republicans rebuffed a right-wing faction that had pressed to rebuke President Biden personally for how the incident was handled.
The vote was a remarkable display of unity in a House that has otherwise been dominated by partisan divisions since Republicans assumed control of the chamber last month, empowering a group of hard-right lawmakers who have taken aim at Mr. Biden in aggressive ways, with some calling for his impeachment. Heeding such voices, House Republican leaders initially proposed seizing on the public frenzy over the balloon, which was shot down by a missile from an F-22 fighter jet over the Atlantic Ocean on Saturday, to issue a censure against the president.
Instead, the House voted 419 to 0 to take China to task for a “brazen violation of United States sovereignty.” The action appeared to reflect a broader belief that has taken hold among senior lawmakers in both parties at the start of the Congress: that the rise of China poses too existential a threat to the United States — economically, militarily and otherwise — to be politicized.
Still, the appearance of the Chinese surveillance balloon had threatened in recent days to upset that consensus, as some Republicans agitated for a formal rebuke of Mr. Biden. Such a measure would almost certainly have passed the House only narrowly and died in the Democratic-led Senate, leaving Congress with no official statement denouncing China for its actions.
The resolution that passed on Thursday, which was negotiated with Democrats and sponsored by Representative Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas and the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, omitted any admonition of the president. Still, it included an implicit criticism in the form of a declaration “that it should be the policy of the United States to promptly and decisively act to prevent foreign aerial surveillance platforms, including those directed by or connected to the C.C.P., from violating U.S. sovereignty.”
“The balloon is a test — a test of this administration to see how it would respond,” Mr. McCaul said on the floor. “I believe the president should have shot it down before it entered American airspace.”
The decision to focus the rebuke on the Chinese government rather than Mr. Biden came only after three influential Republican committee chairmen with jurisdiction over national security matters — Mr. McCaul and Representatives Mike D. Rogers of Alabama and Michael R. Turner of Ohio, who lead the armed services and intelligence panels, respectively — prevailed upon G.O.P. leaders to reject the demands of the hard right. If the goal was countering a foreign adversary, they argued, it would be better to work across the aisle and pass a resolution with near-universal support.
Mr. McCaul negotiated with his Democratic counterpart, Representative Gregory W. Meeks of New York, the ranking member on the foreign affairs panel, to hammer out the final text.
“We worked and were able to change some of the language to make it so we are focused on where I believe the focus should be, and that is that the P.R.C. violated the United States’ sovereignty,” Mr. Meeks said, referring to the People’s Republic of China. Initially, he added, Republicans “were trying to put more blame, unwarranted, on the president — but McCaul didn’t want that, either.”
Mr. Meeks ultimately did not co-sponsor the resolution, after Republicans left out wording he had proposed praising Mr. Biden’s response to the balloon. But he spoke emphatically in support of it on the floor, calling it a measure to “strongly denounce the presence of the balloon in the United States air space.”
The bipartisan negotiations were in keeping with a pattern that has emerged in the early weeks of the 118th Congress. Lawmakers in both parties have taken pains to insulate China policy from the broader partisan warfare unfolding on most other issues and sought to find room for logging bipartisan achievements on the subject, however narrow, where they can.
Last month, the House passed a bill barring the U.S. government from selling crude oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to China — a Republican-led measure that won the support of 113 Democrats. Speaker Kevin McCarthy also elected to keep the party’s most outspoken and combative partisans off a new select committee focused on China, a gesture that was noted with appreciation by Democrats, who did the same on their side of the panel. One hundred and forty-six Democrats joined Republicans in the vote to create the special committee.
Even as members of the House came together to denounce China for its actions, lawmakers in both chambers were grilling Biden administration officials in public hearings and behind closed doors about the balloon response.
“I guarantee you they could have taken that balloon down, that spy balloon, and the greatest risk would have been hitting a cow, a prairie dog or an antelope,” Senator Steve Daines of Montana said, emerging from a closed-door briefing. Montana is the first state where civilians spotted the balloon in the sky, not far from a nuclear base that holds many of the country’s intercontinental ballistic missiles.
“The Biden administration failed by being indecisive and waiting until it came all the way across America,” Mr. Daines added.
Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, said she was livid that the Biden administration did not take down the balloon over her state’s airspace.
“As an Alaskan, I am so angry,” she told Pentagon officials during an Appropriations subcommittee hearing on Thursday morning. “It seems to me the clear message to China is, ‘We’ve got free range in Alaska, because they’re going to let us cruise over that until it gets to more sensitive areas.’”
Similar frustrations were palpable among Democrats, who criticized government officials even as they denounced Republican efforts to profit politically from the episode.
“Do we have a plan for the next time it happens, and how we’re going to deal with it?” Senator Jon Tester of Montana asked during the same hearing. “Because quite frankly I’ll just tell you, I don’t want a damn balloon going across the United States when we potentially could have taken it down over the Aleutian Islands.”
On the House floor,
Democrats defended Mr. Biden’s response, praising his administration for its transparency.
“It serves no purpose to suggest that the commander in chief, President Joe Biden, failed the American people or did anything wrong,” said Representative Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas.
Mr. Meeks pointed out that “this was not the first time” that a Chinese balloon had traversed U.S. airspace, recalling that there had been previous flyovers under President Donald J. Trump’s watch. John F. Kirby, a National Security Council spokesman, said on Monday that Chinese spy balloons had passed over the United States on at least three occasions during the Trump administration, though for briefer periods. Gen. Glen D. VanHerck, the commander of the Pentagon’s Northern Command, stated that previous incursions were not detected in real time.
It is unlikely that the resolution’s passage will put the matters of the surveillance balloon to rest.
“Clearly we still have a lot of concerns about how President Biden mishandled this, and there’ll be places for those conversations to be had,” said Representative Steve Scalise, Republican of Louisiana and the majority leader. “There’s further questions we’re going to have about how the Biden administration mishandled this.”
At least two panel chairmen — Mr. McCaul and Representative Mark E. Green, a Tennessee Republican who leads the Homeland Security Committee — have indicated that they want to scrutinize the Biden administration for its handling of the balloon incursion, though they have yet to formally announce investigations into the matter.