By Michael Hernandez
WASHINGTON (AA) - The House of Representatives unanimously approved a resolution Thursday condemning China for its use of a suspected spy balloon above the continental US.
The resolution was approved in a 419-0 vote. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul sponsored the resolution, which said China's use of the aircraft in the skies above the US is a "brazen violation of United States sovereignty."
The Pentagon announced last week that it was tracking the balloon after it entered US airspace above Montana, which is home to a military facility that houses more than 100 nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles. The US shot the balloon down Saturday in territorial waters in the Atlantic Ocean after it transited the country.
The Biden administration elected not to down it sooner because of potential civilian casualties that could arise with a debris field expected to stretch 7 miles (11 km).
“Last week, the nation watched in shock as a Chinese surveillance balloon traversed much of the United States, including sensitive American military sites like Maelstrom Air Force Base in Montana,” McCaul said about the military facility that stores nuclear missiles.
The resolution, he said, "sends a clear, bipartisan message to the CCP and to our adversaries around the world that this kind of aggression will not be tolerated."
China has sought to portray the aircraft as a weather balloon that had been blown off course and claimed Washington overreacted in shooting it down.
The Biden administration earlier Thursday refuted those explanations, saying it is part of a sprawling fleet of similar balloons used to surveil more than 40 countries across five continents and the US is currently in the process of contacting affected nations to discuss the matter.
A State Department official said, on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of discussions, the high-altitude balloons are set up to collect sensitive information, including communications, and the equipment they carry is "inconsistent with the equipment onboard weather balloons."
The US assessment is based in part on high-resolution imagery of the balloon collected by U-2 reconnaissance planes as the balloon transversed the US beginning last week at an altitude of more than 60,000 feet (18,288 meters), much higher than most planes are capable of flying.
That necessitated the use of the Cold War-era U-2s, which can reach altitudes up to 70,000 feet.
Top Pentagon officials faced pushback from senators of both parties Thursday about the delay in shooting down the aircraft with Alaska Sen. Lisa Lis Murkowski issuing a broadside in which she said she is "so angry. I want to use other words, but I'm not going to."
"It seems to me the clear message to China is, 'we got free range in Alaska,' because they’re going to let us cruise over that until it gets to more sensitive areas," she said during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing.
Democratic Sen. Jon Tester, who chairs the panel's defense subcommittee, said the balloon could have been taken down above Alaska's Aleutian Islands before it transited the state before going to Canada and then the continental US.
"I don't want a damn balloon going across the United States," said the Montana senator. "I've got a problem with a Chinese balloon flying over my state, much less the rest of the country."
Pushing back, Melissa Dalton, the Pentagon's top official for the defense of the US homeland, said the administration "sent a clear message" to China when it was shot down "in our sovereign airspace in our sovereign waters."
"That has established our deterrent line," she said.