In the stiff competition to produce the least credible members of Congress,  the Republican Party’s leading entrants are George Santos and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and the Democrats’ top contender has to be Rashida Tlaib. The Michigan Congresswoman has worked tirelessly to burnish her reputation for mendacity, doing so on a nearly 24/7 basis since Oct. 7, when several thousand Hamas terrorists invaded Israeli communities and slaughtered 1,400 civilians in their homes and while they were at a music festival, blowing some to pieces and burning others alive.

When Palestinian Islamic Jihad fired a rocket from Gaza hoping to murder Israeli civilians and instead hit a Gazan hospital, Tlaib dutifully and angrily repeated Hamas’ falsehood that Israel was to blame, and continued to repeat the false claim even after international intelligence agencies and a battery of independent experts confirmed that what Hamas and Tlaib were claiming was actually a lie. Tlaib doesn’t merely defend Hamas’ “Killing-Israelis-is-perfectly fine” ideology. She embraces it full-throatedly, confident, as well she should be, that a vocal segment of America’s hard left will back her all the way.

So it was unsurprising that Tlaib would swiftly turn on President Joe Biden, who has forcefully affirmed what ought to be the obvious takeaway from Oct. 7: Israel has not only the moral right but the moral obligation not just to defend itself, but to make sure that Hamas, which has been slaughtering Israelis for years, cannot do it anymore. Tlaib and others who ardently desire that Israel accede to its own elimination have threatened Biden that if he doesn’t simply sacrifice Israel to the far left’s nuzzling of Hamas, they will withhold their support from him in next year’s rematch with Donald Trump. “Joe Biden supports the genocide of the Palestinian people,” posted Tlaib a few days ago. And if Biden doesn’t force Israel to stop defending itself from Hamas’ death-grip – a death grip which consigns Israelis and Palestinians alike to constant danger – then “don’t count on us in 2024.”

This is the American left’s version of taking hostages, and they are perfectly happy to take America hostage. If this means that Trump is returned to the Oval Office, so be it. As for the consequences to America of another Trump presidency, Tlaib and company have two words for America: drop dead.

At the same time that the far left threatens to sit on its hands next year, jeopardizing Biden’s re-election from one end, its embrace of butchery as “resistance” makes it look maniacal to most of America, and by extension makes the Democrats look too weak to be trusted to govern. The footage over the weekend of mobs of pro-Hamas demonstrators scaling the White House fence, smearing red paint all over the place and shouting “Allahu Akbar!” plays well among the Democratic Socialists of America and the “Where-is-the-Ayatollah-Khomeini-Now-That-We-Need-Him Society.” It doesn’t play well in America’s heartland, and one imagines that GOP ad-makers are already cutting ads seeking to label Democrats as the party of Hamas.

It hasn’t taken Republicans long to point out that the families of slaughtered Israelis have Iranian cash to thank for their losses. And Iran has the Obama administration to thank for tens of billions of dollars handed over to it courtesy of a nuclear deal that its critics warned would end up funding Hamas and Hezbollah. The former president, whose musings about the current conflict have been somewhere between muddled and meaningless, belittled those who worried about this as “neo-cons” and even unpatriotic. It’s looking a good deal as though Obama was wrong about this, and that those whom he mocked and marginalized deserved to be taken seriously, rather than haughtily dismissed.  Acceding to the supporters of Iran’s proxy in Gaza now is an invitation to undo the Biden administration’s strong record of standing up to killers.

Put simply, Tlaib and crowd seek to hold up Joe Biden at political gunpoint. If that means that they hold up America at gunpoint as well, that’s fine with them.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer and former U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission.