On Friday, MSNBC Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough blasted the Trump administration’s response to a United Nations General Assembly resolution the day before criticizing the United States for recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and planning to move the U.S. embassy there.
Ironically, Scarborough himself, as a Republican member of Congress, introduced a bill that would end U.S. membership in the U.N. and scrap the institution.
On Thursday, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley warned the General Assembly in a passionate speech from the rostrum: “The United States will remember this day in which it was singled out for attack in the General Assembly for the very act of exercising our right as a sovereign nation.” She added: “We will remember it when we are called upon to once again make the world’s largest contribution to the United Nations and we will remember it when so many countries come calling on us, as they so often do, to pay even more and to use our influence for their benefit.”
While many applauded her speech, Scarborough blasted it, in a rant to co-host (and wife) Mika Brzezinski:
If you’re an American, you just don’t want your representatives up there threatening the rest of the world. ‘Cause guess what, Mika? We’re going to need them on Iran. We’re going to need their help on North Korea. We may need their help again in Syria. We’re going to need their help in a thousand places. And yes, they’re going to need our help, too. And guess what? We’re not going to work together if Nikki Haley is going up there humiliating the United States of America by threatening our allies over a non-binding resolution. It’s just like Donald Trump’s tweets. Every response has to be a nuclear response. There is no subtlety of thought.
He later added: “And by the way, there is no diplomat in Nikki Haley. What she did yesterday is an embarrassment to the United States.”
In 1995, Rep. Joe Scarborugh (R-FL) proposed the “United Nations Withdrawal Act.” It proposed: “Effective 4 years after the date of the enactment of this Act, the United States Mission to the United Nations shall be closed and all staff and any remaining functions of such office shall be carried out through the Secretary of State and the Department of State.”
The bill also proposed reducing U.S. contributions to the United Nations by 25 percent each year over the four-year period until the U.S. left the organization entirely. It terminated all American contributions to U.N. peacekeeping operations after four years, including any fund supporting American personnel involved in peacekeeping missions.
Moreover, the bill proposed that the U.S. kick the United Nations out of its current headquarters in New York City: “It is the sense of the Congress that the United States should request the withdrawal of the United Nations headquarters (and its affiliated missions) from the United States.”
By contrast, Haley, and Trump, merely suggested that the U.S. would reconsider its funding to the United Nations.
Scarborough’s bill failed in the 104th Congress.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. He is the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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