For the past week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has put on a master class of cunning and ruthless political gamesmanship as the Senate has debated a new foreign aid bill that provides funding to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.
Months ago, at the behest of the Republican conference, McConnell initiated negotiations with Senate Democrats to exchange some border security measures for the foreign aid funding bill that the White House and establishment Republicans such as McConnell so desperately want.
The result of these negotiations was a bill that offered some token policy changes in exchange for codifying the administration’s disastrous catch-and-release policy that has encouraged the massive influx of illegal immigration at the southern border.
The deal predictably fell apart as the majority of Republicans balked, so Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and McConnell decided to move forward on a foreign aid bill without any border security provisions. And the measure is on the verge of sailing through the Senate in less than a week.
For McConnell, this represents the ultimate triumph. The Republican Senate leader was never committed to exchanging border security for the foreign aid bill. If he did, he would have listened to the concerns of Republican senators and set stronger parameters for negotiators.
“They had their shot,” McConnell said of the senators who wanted to negotiate a deal on the two matters. “The reason we’ve been talking about the border is because they wanted to.”
In other words, he never wanted this to begin with.
Now, the Senate is poised to pass the foreign aid bill with no strings attached, and McConnell is leading the charge to deliver votes from centrist Republicans to ensure the bill passes. For McConnell, the goal is Ukraine aid at all costs.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), in a Monday op-ed in the American Conservative, detailed how the aid bill as written would even force former President Donald Trump to continue funding Ukraine if he is to win the presidential election in November. If Trump were to refuse to fund Ukraine, it would set up a situation that would be nearly identical to what led to Trump’s impeachment in 2019.
“Five years after impeaching Trump for refusing to spend money on Ukraine, they have drafted a new law that again requires Trump to spend money on Ukraine,” Vance wrote. “If he negotiates an end to the war, as he has promised to do, they will undoubtedly argue that he has broken the law. We are nearly a year away from an election that could give Trump the presidency, and Ukraine-obsessive Republicans have already given the Democrats a predicate to impeach him.”
By including a failsafe to prevent Trump from freezing Ukraine aid and refusing to work with the members of his conference like Vance who are more in touch with the base, McConnell is proving yet again that he is far more concerned with providing aid to Ukraine than he is with securing the sovereign border of the United States. And he may be successful.
The expectation is that this foreign aid bill is going to die in the House, in which Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) will block it from ever receiving a floor vote. But House Democrats and pro-Ukraine Republicans could sign on to a discharge petition and force the House to vote on the bill, likely delivering it to President Joe Biden’s desk.
This is what McConnell is counting on, concerns of the base and the majority of Republicans in the House be damned. By relying on Democrats to achieve his policy goals, the minority leader of the Senate is embracing a cunning and ruthless political tactic that only serves to make Republicans appear more divided, even if it succeeds in achieving his goal of funding Ukraine.
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The truth is McConnell and his allies in the Republican establishment do not care about the base and its concerns. After all, only senators who get secret classified briefings are smart enough to know that the taxpayer must foot the bill for the war in Ukraine. Just ask Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC).
“Our base cannot possibly know what’s at stake at the level that any well-briefed U.S. senator should know about what’s at stake if Putin wins,” Tillis said.
