(CNSNews.com) - "Well, letting a Chinese surveillance balloon lazily drift over America is like seeing a robber on your front porch and inviting him in, showing him where you keep your safe, where you keep your guns, where your children sleep at night, and then politely asking him to leave.
"It makes no sense," Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Select Committee on China, told "Sunday Morning Futures."
"It makes us look weak and flat-footed on the world stage. Furthermore, if these Bloomberg reports are true that the Biden administration deliberately tried to keep the American people in the dark so as to salvage Secretary Blinken's trip to Beijing, that's unacceptable.
"Allowing this to happen in order to preserve a photo-op with Xi Jinping, who is committing genocide, that's foreign policy malpractice. And let's assume that the balloon was mostly harmless or we neutralized it. Do we think that this was -- the timing was coincidental?
"It's far more likely that they deliberately timed this in order to send a message as Blinken was preparing for his trip. And the message is, look what we can do to you and get away with. Your corporations, your career politicians, they will come crawling back.
"And so the message I have for the Biden administration is, don't fall for the Chinese Communist Party charm offensive. It's a farce. It's a bedtime story they tell out-of-touch global elites at Davos. It's time to push back before it's too late, before something far more dangerous than a balloon is flying over American territory."
Gallagher agreed with those who say the balloon could have and should have been shot down over the remote Aleutian Islands in Alaska:
"And if we don't have the capability to neutralize it, corral it, collect it, look under the hood, and exploit it, well, that's a capability we need to develop with an $850 billion defense budget, because I suspect this isn't the last time we're going to see a Chinese probe.
"There's other things we need to do here, Maria. We need to kick PLA-affiliated researchers off American universities. We need to make sure that CCP affiliates can't buy land next to sensitive military bases in America. And we need to shut down what are effectively CCP police stations here on American soil. This is unacceptable. We need to defend American sovereignty."
President Joe Biden said on Saturday that he told military leaders, on Wednesday, to shoot down the balloon:
"On Wednesday, when I was briefed on the balloon, I ordered the Pentagon to shoot it down, on Wednesday, as soon as possible. They decided — without doing damage to anyone on — on the ground. They decided that the best time to do that was as it got over water, outside — within our — within the 12-mile limit.
"They successfully took it down. And I want to compliment our aviators who did it. And we’ll have more to report on this a little later," the president said.
Also See:
Chinese Spy Balloon Timeline