The Ukraine Showdown

Against expectation, the Senate is pushing forward a clean foreign aid bill, including for Ukraine. But the House is stonewalling.

Photo courtesy of Reddit

The Senate, which worked for the first time ever through the Super Bowl weekend, will soon pass an aid bill that covers Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and Gaza. This rescue bill came together after efforts to include border security in the aid bill collapsed because, well, Trump wanted it to.

A group of 17 GOP senators, comprising veterans, traditional conservatives, and those with national security experience, formed a block big enough to overcome a filibuster by Trump’s allies in the Senate. They joined Democrats to advance the aid bill, minus the border security provisions, through key procedural votes.

These senators understand that, no matter what you believe about our border issues, the U.S. cannot abdicate its responsibility to guard against fascist aggression abroad. They also understand that Russia believes it can prevail with enough patience—and if it can successfully splinter Western support for Ukraine. 

That splintering is evident now in the House GOP conference. Speaker Mike Johnson is doing Trump’s bidding, who in turn is doing Putin’s bidding. And it’s no accident that Trump recently signaled that if he were president again, he would tell Russia to do whatever the hell it wanted. As a result, Speaker Johnson has indicated that aid for Ukraine won’t even get a House vote. 

How should we view this latest showdown over Ukraine and the disunity within the GOP over Ukraine? As Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) squares off against Speaker Johnson and the MAGA extremists over the bill, one thing is now clear: The war in Ukraine has become the third wedge to split the GOP, after abortion and the border. Extremists are dragging the party to the hard right on these issues, away from what most voters in the general election want. And the consequences are more dire than ever.

Let’s review how we got to this precarious point, including how the GOP obstructionists are now in a doom loop over border security. I should note upfront, as I seek to briefly recap the bill’s history, that the Republican position makes no logical sense—until you realize that they have no position other than what Trump wants. 

Then we’ll discuss how the stakes over the current splintering go far beyond what we’ve seen before, and why, this time, they just might prove too high even for the do-nothing GOP in Congress to bear.

Border in, border out

When the Biden White House came to Congress with a request for aid for Ukraine and Israel back in October, it was told in no uncertain terms that any deal would have to include major concessions that Republicans wanted to fix the “crisis” at the border. Senate negotiators from both sides, led by Sens. James Lankford (R-OK) and Chris Murphy (D-CT), met for four months in an attempt to craft a compromise that both sides could live with.

This was no small feat, getting to a compromise deal that both the Trump-friendly Border Patrol union and most Senate Democrats were willing to back. But before the bill’s text was even publicly released, Donald Trump weighed in, urging his party to reject it outright so as not to hand Joe Biden a political win during an election year.

In other words, the GOP Senate killed its own border security bill, proving that the crisis perhaps was not so bad as to require immediate attention, or at least wasn’t as important as Trump’s reelection campaign. 

But what about the rest of the bill, comprising aid to Ukraine, Israel, Gaza and Taiwan? That is basically the deal now likely to pass the Senate: everything but the border security that the extremists had torpedoed. 

It’s important to note that, contrary to the notion that billions of dollars are simply going to be wired to Ukrainian accounts, the lion’s share of the funding for Ukraine, some 90 percent of it, will be spent in the United States to pay American manufacturers for the cost of new weapons or to replace the weapons being sent over. Even with this understanding, however, Putin mouthpieces such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Q-GA) and Rand Paul (R-KY) have been busy mischaracterizing the aid in order to block it.

It’s also important to point out the utter absurdity of Speaker Johnson’s position. He now claims that he will not allow a vote because any bill must address border security. But when presented earlier with a bill that did just that, he rejected it outright before even reading it. He and his MAGA extremists insisted that they would rather have no bill than a measure that only met most of the GOP’s draconian demands.

Johnson then tried to sneak one past the House by proposing a stand-alone aid bill just for Israel, but that embarrassingly went down to defeat, with detractors rightfully seeing it as a way to exclude Ukraine from any bill.

But just think about that for a moment. Johnson and the MAGA right were willing to pass a clean aid bill for Israel, with no demands for border security. But now they aren’t willing to do the exact same thing if Ukraine is included. The message is crystal clear: Their problem is Ukraine. They don’t want to fund the war because they are in fact stooges for Vladimir Putin.

Brinksmanship, but with millions of lives and world security at stake

We have seen this playbook before. A handful of extremists in the House GOP, including a captive Speaker who must do their bidding or lose his leadership position, tried to hold the nation hostage in order to get their way on budget cuts. They threatened to blow up the global economy by refusing to raise the U.S. debt ceiling—but then Speaker McCarthy blinked and agreed to a compromise budget, with more Democrats voting for it than Republicans.

When it came to implementing that budget later in the fall, extremists tried again to force cuts that were outside of the agreement. To avoid a government shutdown, McCarthy had to kick the budget can a couple months through a clean continuing resolution—again with more Democratic votes than Republican. For that sin, he lost his speakership.

Now the new Speaker faces a similar situation. There is bipartisan support for the foreign aid package, and time is running out for Ukraine. Only this time, a showdown and a failure of the bill is precisely what Johnson will seek to engineer, even if it means Ukraine will lose the war and murderous Russian aggression will be rewarded. He cannot bring the bill to the floor himself for a vote because Rep. Greene has threatened to move to vacate the chair if he does, and he might not survive that. His only option is to save his own skin and do Trump‘a bidding by allowing the measure to die on the vine without a vote.

A way around Johnson?

With inaction the most likely route for Johnson on the bill, its supporters are scrambling to circumvent him by bringing it to the floor directly. This requires a process called a “discharge petition” which would require at least a few GOP House members to join most of the Democrats in demanding a vote on the bill. Such a petition, which needs to be signed by a majority of Congressmembers, would “discharge” the bill from whatever committee it is stuck in and bring it to the floor.

The math on this is tricky. There are a few Democrats who likely remain opposed to the bill because it provides Israel with more aid and no conditions upon it. That was enough to cause a few defections from the bill among progressive senators, such as Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

Whether there are enough Republicans House members who remain pro-Ukraine and anti-Putin to make up the difference isn’t clear. Over a third of the GOP senators, including the two top Republican leaders, Mitch McConnell and John Thune (R-SD), voted for the bill despite Trump’s lobbying against it. But it is highly unlikely we will see nearly as high a percentage of GOP House members standing up to Trump.

Ukraine is now a wedge

In the horrific event that Ukraine funding fails because of GOP cowardice and capture by Russia, Democrats will need to work to restore the aid by retaking the House and relying upon the Senate to stay firm. The abandonment of a key ally, and the shift of the base of the GOP toward Russia and Putin, will become another rallying cry for November and another wedge issue that puts the GOP dramatically out of step with the voters, who still back Ukrainian funding by a strong majority.

If the Senate supermajority in support of Ukraine is angry enough about that abandonment, it can seek to attach the aid to the budget that must pass in March. It’s unclear how or whether this might succeed, but the Senate is not without alternatives and power here. It is incumbent upon the Senate and the White House now to make sure the issue does not go away and that the political pressures upon the MAGA right continue to build on it. 

Like the debt ceiling before it, failure here is not an option and would lead to horrific, if predictable, consequences. The sooner Speaker Johnson understands that he cannot hold the whole world hostage by leveraging his threadbare, three-vote majority in the House, the better chance the Ukrainian people will have of surviving this long nightmare and holding at bay, and ultimately defeating, an already weakened Russia.