On Wednesday, House Minority Leader and probable future Speaker of the House Rep. Kevin McCarthy indicated that once Republicans were in control of the House, funding for Ukraine’s military would be on the chopping block.
“I think people are gonna be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine,” he recently told Punchbowl News. “They just won’t do it.”
Instead, McCarthy thinks a Republican Congress should concentrate more on domestic issues.
“There’s the things [the Biden administration] is not doing domestically,” he said. “Not doing the border, and people begin to weigh that. Ukraine is important, but at the same time, it can’t be the only thing they do, and it can’t be a blank check.”
That may be true. But if McCarthy is going to go toe-to-toe with Biden on Ukraine funding, those very same domestic concerns would be left behind as a real donnybrook would break out on the Hill.
If the GOP majority hopes to defund Ukraine over the preference of a majority of voters, Republicans in leadership are going to have to make the case to the public. Every minute they spend doing that is a minute that isn’t spent addressing inflation, securing the border, supporting local law enforcement, curbing the efforts of social engineers to teach progressive cultural values in the classroom, and so on. In other words, the Republican majority would have to abandon the issues that got them the majority in the first place, and only to satisfy the fixations of a loud minority of populist agitators.
Noah Rothman is right. And it wouldn’t just be a fight with Biden and the Democrats. Ukraine is a cause of many in the Republican caucus, and any effort to defund the Ukrainians in the middle of an existential fight for their nationhood would meet stiff opposition from many Republicans.
Not only would McCarthy commit his members to an uphill messaging campaign, he’d also be incepting internecine conflict within his own conference. Rep. Michael McCaul, who will likely chair the House Foreign Affairs Committee in a Republican-led House, told reporters just last week that the Biden administration isn’t doing enough to back Ukraine. He supports sending “longer-range artillery and additional air-defense systems” to the frontlines. “Better arming and equipping of Ukraine will help save lives and give Ukraine the capacity to end this war faster,” said Sen. Jim Risch, McCaul’s counterpart on foreign affairs in the Senate. Aides close to Mitch McConnell insist that he “is not going to shy away from continuing to support Ukraine,” which suggests even a GOP-led effort to let Ukraine’s funding quietly expire isn’t going to be so quiet.
Even the threat of cutting off funding has spooked the Democrats and Biden. There is a serious push underway on the Hill to cobble together a bipartisan coalition to pass a gargantuan $50 billion Ukraine aid package after the midterms.
The plan is to fold the aid package into an omnibus spending bill filled with plenty of goodies for congressmen, making it very difficult to vote against. It will almost certainly get enough Republican votes to breeze through the House, and Majority Leader McConnell wouldn’t have to twist many arms to get it through the Senate.
Congress has already allocated $65 billion for military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine. This has amounted to a blank check with very little oversight and virtually no debate in Congress. Perhaps it’s time for Republicans to take a hard look at the money being spent and the purposes it’s being spent on. President Zelenskyy should not be able to dictate to Congress what U.S. aid should be.
McCarthy should get Congress to do its job and put a check on the executive and its profligate spending.
