Majority Leader Schumer Floor Remarks Applauding President Biden’s Calm, Calculated and Effective Work To Successfully Shoot Down The Chinese Surveillance Balloon And Confirming An All-Senators Briefing This Week On The Issue

Washington, D.C. –  Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) today spoke on the Senate floor and called for bipartisan support of President Biden’s work to shoot down the Chinese Surveillance Balloon ahead of the all-Senators briefing on Thursday. Below are Senator Schumer’s remarks, which can also be viewed here:

I strongly—very strongly—condemn President Xi’s brazen incursion into American airspace with the Chinese Surveillance Balloon. And I commend President Biden for being calm, calculated, and effective in taking down the balloon over water to ensure the safety of Americans on the ground and ensure we maximize our intelligence gains as we examine this balloon, which is far less likely to burn and crash into a million pieces in water than over land.

Instead of criticizing China, I was shocked to hear MAGA Republicans — before they even knew what was happening, before they even knew the whole story! — direct their criticism towards the president, saying we should have shot down the balloon the moment we saw it.

So, it’s clear the MAGA Republican criticism was at best premature and at worst political.

This is one area where we don't need politics. We need Democrats and Republicans to come together to condemn China and be a unified front against the CCP.

President Biden and his team did the right thing. They waited and took down the balloon carefully and precisely and with what both the military and intelligence experts urged them to do. Had the president not gone along with what the military said, I can imagine that some of these same Republicans—so highly political in their criticism—would have then criticized the president for not listening to the military leaders. But now, we can recover most of the equipment and begin to analyze the technology and the way it was done.

Again, I applaud President Biden for his leadership. And on Thursday, all Senators, all Senators, we have upgraded this because so many senators wanted a briefing. I asked the administration to do it as an all-Senators briefing instead of the gang of eight and that’s what’s going to happen. So all senators will receive a classified briefing from administration officials on the surveillance balloon.

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