GOP lawmakers criticize Biden over Chinese balloon response
Now that the Chinese spy balloon has been shot down, political finger pointing about the timing of the strike is underway. Just a day before President Biden is set to give his first state of the union address before a divided Congress, the U.S. took down the balloon off the Carolina coast over the weekend after it flew over sensitive military sites. Multiple Republican lawmakers say the president should have shot it down sooner than he did. Beijing claims the balloon was meant for observing weather conditions. President Biden said this incident with China would not change his speech to the nation tomorrow night.
I want to talk to the American people and let them know the state of affairs. What's going on, what I'm looking forward to working on, just point on what we've done, and just have a conversation with the American people. For more on this, we are joined by Scott McFarland and Major Garrett. Scott is, of course, our CBS News congressional correspondent major. CBS News is chief Washington correspondent major. I just want to start off with you. Big picture here.
What does this mean for U.S.-China relations? We know things were already bad, but does this take things to a new low? Unlike a lot of Republicans in Congress who are critical of President Biden, I've been to China three times with different American presidents. One thing I've learned about the U.S.-China relationship is China never wants to be on its back foot. It always wants to be asserting what it believes are its interests and trying to keep America off balance.
The balloon situation completely shifted that. China had to issue three different consecutive statements, each of them a little bit more apologetic, slightly, not deeply apologetic, but by Chinese standards, recognizing that this thing was out of their control and they were not shaping or in any way affecting the narrative. That meant the U.S. was in a position of leverage vis-a-vis China, diplomatically and otherwise. So this did not work out well for the Chinese at any level, and the United States has the balloon and we'll find out exactly what its capabilities are and what they were trying to do with it. The United States government has asserted with complete confidence this was a surveillance balloon.
We now will find a technology to prove that. And it's up to the Biden administration at this moment to be as transparent as possible, to tell the American people everything it can learn about this, why it was so confident, why it waited until it was over in South Carolina, to shoot it down and what's in it. And when that happens, it will have a story to tell. And if the Republicans who are criticizing the White House now can't counter that, then this will be a net plus for the United States and slightly improve U.S. relations with China in the sense that it's always about leverage, who has it, who's looking for it. This puts the United States in a slightly more leveraged position.
And speaking of some of that Republican reaction, we know actually there was outrage on both sides of the aisle and concern about how exactly this happened, Scott. Let's take a listen to what some lawmakers said over the weekend, and we'll talk to you on the other side. They should have been prepared. They seem not only to be unprepared, but to even be waiting. Where is the balloon going to go? What are they trying to do? That's not how you look at the actions of an adversary. At the end of the day, I think the only reason they shot it down is because it made it into the news. And they felt forced to as a matter of politics rather than national security.
We should not have had this kind of incursion into the United States. And we have a real problem with China on a number of issues, from their human rights violations to their violations of international business law, to even the challenges we've had with them on overt spying. So I'm grateful that the military took decisive action when they did and how they did. So, Scott, again, given some of these concerns that lawmakers have expressed, what steps of any may Congress take? Republicans have this whole array of choices, Nicole, from which to choose in terms of a response to this balloon incident. They could choose to draft a resolution of disapproval. They could call for hearings or briefings or for the president to mention it in a state of the union address. Collectively, over the past 48 hours, Republicans have chosen all the options for how to respond.
They have made all of those requests in more, including Senator James Langford, who said he wanted to be part of the president's state of the union address tomorrow. Senator Josh Hawley, the Republican from Missouri, says he would like to have a hearing in the Senate Homeland Security Committee about this. There's a possibility of a resolution on the House floor, and you just heard Michael Turner of Ohio, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, saying he wants a briefing. So they're flooding the zone with responses to call the major. It's just a matter of how impactful that's going to be 24 hours before the state of the union. And Major, how is the president defending his response on this? And do you expect it will be featured prominently in his address tomorrow night? Not prominently in the sense that we're going to have 10 minutes on the balloon. We'll probably have two or three minutes.
And the briefings are going to occur, the Gang of Eight, which is the city to the top of Congress's intelligence. It's all leadership. They'll get briefed. The relevant committees will be briefed. If the administration has a story to tell, trust me, it will tell it and back it up with the requisite intelligence for those committees. The president wants to say, look, and we'll say there was a danger once it came over the continental U.S.
, the lower 48. The debris field could have been large and unpredictable. It was much better to have that debris field in the water, 47 feet of water. We've now figured out which is easy to retrieve, and that was the safest possible alternative. And the administration has said there were three episodes of this earlier that weren't understood because there was a awareness gap. Well, you better explain what an awareness gap is and make sure as this story develops, you don't have a credibility gap. So it's really on the administration's shoulders to explain this, and it's in a perfect position to do so.
Everything it's represented can be backed up, and if it can, it will have a story to tell. If it can't, the Republican critics over time will be proven more right than what else might we hear from the president tomorrow night. We're going to hear about jobs. We're going to hear about the economic prosperity of the country. 517,000 new jobs in the most previous month. That's a huge number, much bigger than the consensus of the economic forecasters. That's very good news for the president.
And he will also talk about things that he raised last year, the state of the union. He said there was something on burn pits and veterans benefits. That was approved by Congress. He signed that into law. He wanted some components of what became the Inflation Reduction Act. Insulin, capped. Some prescription drug costs, capped.
That's happened. Those things are specific things. You can say a year ago, I asked this Congress to do it and I delivered. Those are going to be the kind of component parts of this. Plus, it's now a year since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was only less than a week old at his last day of the union. He'll talk about what has happened in the intervening year.
What is the state of the NATO alliance? What is the state of Europe? And how Russia miscalculated in Ukraine. I think that's going to be a big part of it as well. All right, Major Garrett, Scott McFarland, thanks so much.
Chinese spy balloon, State of the Union, republicans, Biden