Tim Scott Slams ‘Biden Wing’ of the GOP as Hamas Terror Brings Party’s Foreign-Policy Divisions to the Fore

Senator Tim Scott (R., S.C.) took aim at fellow 2024 contenders Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy as the “Joe Biden wing of the Republican Party” during a speech on Tuesday about the need to stand with Israel and wipe Hamas terrorists off the face of the Earth.

The comments highlight the intraparty divide over how involved the U.S. should be in foreign affairs. While the war in Ukraine has emerged as a sticking point between the candidates, the contenders largely came out strongly in support of Israel.

After taking aim at President Biden over his “weakness” and saying he was partly to blame for Hamas’ devastating terror attack against Israel over the weekend, Scott told an audience at the Hudson Institute in D.C. that some conservatives are also guilty of displaying “weakness” and “confusion” in foreign affairs.

“Vivek Ramaswamy has said the definition of success is reducing America’s support for Israel,” Scott said. “And he’s proposed that we surrender Taiwan to the Chinese Communist Party as long as we’ve relocated some factories. Governor DeSantis once dismissed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as just some ‘territorial dispute.’”

“The last thing we need is a Joe Biden wing of the Republican Party on foreign policy,” he said.

Hamas terrorists launched a surprise attack against Israel on the 50th anniversary of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Terrorists have killed more than 1,000 Israeli civilians, wounded thousands, and captured hundreds of hostages in the attack. At least 14 Americans were killed, while others were taken hostage.

Scott said Hamas’s “despicable acts deserve nothing less than the full measure of justice” and said the people behind the attack “need to feel the wrath of God. And they need to meet some Israeli or American military hardware to help them on their way.”

“And when I’m in the Oval Office, if Israel finds itself in need of anything, one phone call to my White House is all it will take,” Scott said. “When America’s allies need to reload, the arsenal of democracy has to be stocked and ready.”

Scott and the rest of the GOP field have been critical of the Biden administration’s decision to un-freeze $6 billion in Iranian funds being held in Qatari banks in exchange for the release of five American prisoners from Iranian custody. Many Republicans are calling on the administration to re-freeze the funds or re-issue them to Israel.

White House national-security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters, “We have not yet had $1 of that $6 billion spent, and I will leave it at that.” Critics, meanwhile, have pointed out that the funds, which the administration claims can only be used for humanitarian purposes, nevertheless free up the regime to spend more on spreading terror in the Middle East.

Scott has called for a Senate Banking Committee probe into the funds.

The senator’s speech largely echoed comments he made in an interview with NR’s Zach Kessel on Saturday as the tragic events unfolded.

“I would make sure that we were in a position to move our Sixth Fleet into the area so as to provide backup, whether it’s humanitarian aid or assistance with hostages,” Scott said, referring to the U.S. Navy’s Sixth Fleet, which operates as part of U.S. Naval Forces Europe–Africa and is headquartered in Naples, Italy.

He suggested that if he were president, he would want American troops to “be as close as possible and on call, so to speak, for [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and Israel.”

When Kessel asked the presidential hopeful whether he would support an American presence on the ground in Israel if the situation continued to deteriorate, Scott said he “would take nothing off the table.”

Meanwhile, Ramaswamy’s campaign accused Scott of “lying” in his comments about the entrepreneur on Tuesday.

“We understand Tim Scott is attempting to gain some semblance of relevance in this race, but lying in the face of these barbaric atrocities isn’t an effective way to do so,” Ramaswamy spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin told the New York Post.

McLaughlin added that Ramaswamy “has offered a clear, rational response that supports Israel while avoiding another U.S.-led disaster in the Middle East.”

However, aid to Israel is one of a number of issues on which Ramaswamy has taken seemingly ever-shifting positions.

While his campaign website tells voters he will not cut aid to Israel until it tells the U.S. that it no longer needs the aid, Ramaswamy told the Washington Free Beacon just two months ago that “the true mark of success for the U.S., and for Israel, will be to get to a 2028 where Israel is so strongly standing on its own two feet, integrated into the economic and security infrastructure of the rest of the Middle East, that it will not require and be dependent on that same level of historical aid or commitment from the U.S.”

Over the weekend, Ramaswamy criticized Biden for not meeting face-to-face with Netanyahu. The presidential candidate did not answer a question about whether he would send U.S. troops to Israel if the Israeli government made such a request.

Scott and former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley have taken perhaps the most hawkish stance on the issue, with Haley calling on Netanyahu to “finish them” after the attack.

“Finish them. Finish them. They should have hell to pay for what they’ve just done,” Haley said of the terrorists during an appearance on Fox News.

That U.S. foreign policy has once again been thrust into the spotlight could be a boost to Haley’s campaign, given her experience as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Reporting from the Associated Press suggests potential donors were discussing her international experience as an asset during fundraising calls earlier this week.

“This underscores, or reemphasizes, the importance that the president of the United States know what they are doing on the world stage,” Bill Strong, a retired international banker who has been raising money for Haley, told the outlet. “They have to know the region. They have to know the players. Nikki knows them all extremely well. No one else does. You can argue the former president doesn’t.”

Speaking in Glenwood, Iowa, over the weekend, former vice president Mike Pence called on President Biden to assure Israel that the U.S. will send military support and aid.

He also took aim at “voices of appeasement like Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron DeSantis that I believe have run contrary to the tradition in our party that America is the leader of the free world.”

“This is also what happens when you have leaders in the Republican Party signaling retreat on the world stage,” Pence said of the attacks.

DeSantis dismissed Pence’s remarks as “hollow criticism.”

The Florida governor, for his part, said Biden should show full support of Israel in using lethal force to “root out Hamas once and for all.”

“It’s not enough to just launch a strike. When you’re dealing with Hamas you need to uproot the entire terror network,” DeSantis said while campaigning in Iowa on Sunday. He said Israel had so far failed to do so because “they get a lot of international pressure, not just from the United Nations but the Europeans.”

Asked how much aid he would support sending to Israel, DeSantis said the country has a “very robust military capability.”

“What Israel does with [the aid] is it compliments what they do for themselves. They don’t expect the United States to do this stuff for them,” he told reporters.

Speaking at a Florida synagogue earlier this week, DeSantis also proposed state-level sanctions against Iran over its support of Hamas.

Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie suggested during an appearance on Fox News on Saturday that Biden should ask Congress to come back into session on Monday and “vote for whatever aid Israel needs to make sure that they win this war and win it completely and quickly.”

Former president Donald Trump said he would cut off funding to the Palestinians on “Day One” if he were reelected and vowed to reimpose and expand a travel ban on a handful of majority-Muslim countries.

“Less than four years ago, we had peace in the Middle East with the historic Abraham Accords. Today we have all-out war in Israel, and it’s going to spread very quickly” Trump said during a campaign stop in Wolfeboro, N.H. “What a difference a president makes.”

Seventy-eight percent of Republicans said they support Israel in a survey conducted by Gallup back in March. Just 11 percent said they support the Palestinians. More independents support Israel as well, with 49 percent saying they support the U.S. ally, 32 percent saying they support the Palestinians, and 19 percent saying they do not favor one side or the other.

Around NR

• Now that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is running in the 2024 presidential race as an independent, rather than a Democrat, Dan McLaughlin is urging people not to sleep on the impact of his withdrawal from the primaries, particularly the New Hampshire primary.

As much as 40 percent of the Republican primary electorate could be independents, so their size and composition could be a big deal. Moreover, with the New Hampshire primary unsanctioned by the Democrats and Biden perhaps not even being on the primary ballot, some New Hampshire Democratic voters were considering re-registering as independents to vote on the Republican side… Color me skeptical that this will be a big force by itself. But it adds to the overall dynamic in which independents deciding which primary to vote in — a factor in every New Hampshire primary — now have a strong incentive to focus on the Republican side.

• “Donald Trump is getting indicted and tried all the way into a third Republican presidential nomination, and perhaps a second term in office,” writes Rich Lowry.

Trump’s court dates and legal entanglements aren’t a distraction from his campaign, as some observers predicted; in large part, they are the campaign.

• Jim Geraghty writes of the Iowa Democrats’ punishment for botching the vote count on caucus night in 2020; while the DNC stripped the state of its first-in-the-nation privileges, the state party decided to rebel and instead hold a mail-in primary in January at the time of its regular caucus meetings. Now, the DNC has reportedly told the state party that it cannot release any results of the mail-in primary until Super Tuesday and that it will have to accept votes until that date.

As of this writing, on Super Tuesday, Democrats will select their presidential nominee — almost certainly President Biden, barring some sudden health issue or other unexpected event — in Alabama, American Samoa, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, and Virginia. In other words, Iowa will be just another state, nothing special, nothing early, nothing key to the race.

• Nikki Haley’s campaign reported raising $11.6 million in the third fundraising quarter, of which $9.1 million can be spent in the presidential primary, Zach Kessel reports.The fundraising boost means Haley’s campaign now has more cash-on-hand than the DeSantis campaign.

The uptick in donations comes after Haley’s poll numbers have surged in key states. The former South Carolina governor now finds herself in third place in Iowa and second place in New Hampshire and her home state, according to the RealClearPolitics average. In national polls, she currently sits in third place behind Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who himself trails former president Donald Trump.

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