Senate Passes Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan Foreign Aid Bill

31 Senate Republicans voted for the $95 billion foreign aid bill pic.twitter.com/SdXoIsPkxX

— Hunter Wallace (@LutherEnjoyer) April 24, 2024

These people truly just repeat all the same WWII analogies on zombified autopilot. They might as well be doing it in their sleep. After reminiscing about striding through Kyiv with John McCain, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) asks colleagues: “Do you want to be Chamberlain or Churchill?” pic.twitter.com/316RhQQou0

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) April 23, 2024

Sen. John Thune (R-SD) thunders that a newly victorious Putin must not be allowed “on the doorstep” of NATO countries if he conquers Ukraine. But these same people just voted to expand NATO to 800+ miles of border with Russia, by way of Finland! Sputtering incoherence, as usual pic.twitter.com/T8uwqClyWZ

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) April 23, 2024

.@LeaderMcConnell: “I think the demonization of Ukraine began by @TuckerCarlson, who in my opinion ended up where he should have been all along, which is interviewing Vladimir Putin.” pic.twitter.com/brVaYt4Eek

— CSPAN (@cspan) April 23, 2024

Chuck Schumer celebrates that he and Mitch McConnell “worked hand-in-hand, and shoulder-to-shoulder” to finally get the enormous $100 billion war-funding bill passed today. Everyone is supposed to weep tears of gratitude for this glorious bipartisan achievement pic.twitter.com/Dnwq3pUN5G

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) April 23, 2024

If banning TikTok is so necessary for our “National Security,” why do our elected officials have to use totally made-up statistics to argue their case? Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) contends that 150+ million Americans must be banned from TikTok because it’s not pro-Ukraine enough pic.twitter.com/7Pio6xbnEm

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) April 23, 2024

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) has a message for younger Americans who may be skeptical that the government is barreling ahead to ban an app that’s wildly popular in their age cohort: You haven’t seen the important intel briefings about how scary a threat TikTok is. Tough luck, kiddos! pic.twitter.com/SjSH8Lo9Z0

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) April 23, 2024

Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-NE) comes right out and admits it: they’re about to ban TikTok because “young people are getting their news” from the app, and “pro-Palestinian” hashtags generate lots of views. He says Chinese Communists are “pushing this racist agenda” to undermine America pic.twitter.com/ahcRcnXXfU

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) April 23, 2024

Lindsey Graham, who strategized with Trump to pass the giant war funding bill, explains the true meaning of “America First” — as contrasted with “isolationism”

GRAHAM: “America First says, let’s help Israel. Let’s help Ukraine. Let’s turn it into a loan rather than a grant” pic.twitter.com/x1Jt4aVtc8

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) April 24, 2024

Here’s why you can’t necessarily take YES or NO votes from politicians at face value in terms of their substantive positions on the legislation before them.

If anyone thinks Marco Rubio and Rick Scott (R-FL) are opposed on principle to Ukraine/Israel/Taiwan funding, I have a… pic.twitter.com/ATU4meLVXX

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) April 24, 2024

Dana Perino asks Mitch McConnell if $60 billion will be enough to defeat Russia:

McConnell: “Well, we hope so.”

He knows it’s not enough. He knows Zelenskyy will come begging again in 6 months. He also knows we will be on the hook to rebuild Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/lrec5P5uSi

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) April 24, 2024

In the final vote, 31 Senate Republicans voted for it, 15 voted against it and 3 missed the vote. 64% of Senate Republicans voted against the will of 61% of Republican voters.

New York Times:

“The Senate voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday night to give final approval to a $95.3 billion package of aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, sending it to President Biden and ending months of uncertainty about whether the United States would continue to back Kyiv in its fight against Russian aggression.

The vote reflected resounding bipartisan support for the measure, which passed the House on Saturday by lopsided margins after a tortured journey on Capitol Hill, where it was nearly derailed by right-wing resistance. The Senate’s action, on a vote of 79 to 18, provided a victory for the president, who had urged lawmakers to move quickly so he could sign it into law. … ”

The most striking thing to me about the House and Senate debate over Ukraine aid is how much the rhetoric resembled this George Will column in The Washington Post.

“Tuesday’s Senate ratification of Ukrainian aid proves that Dwight Eisenhower’s baton of Republican internationalism was passed, via Ronald Reagan, to Mitch McConnell. They are the three most important Republicans of the past 100 years. …

The Economist columnist Charlemagne says Ukraine’s defeat would be a “Suez moment” for the West. Meaning, a humbling demonstration of waning power. Two months ago, Estonian intelligence said: “Russians in their own thinking are calculating that military conflict with NATO is possible in the next decade.” Josep Borrell, the European Union’s chief diplomat, says: “A high-intensity, conventional war in Europe is no longer a fantasy.”

Today’s Moscow-Beijing-Tehran axis is, as the 1930s Axis was, watching. Johns Hopkins foreign policy analyst Hal Brands, writing for Bloomberg, reminds us: “Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 encouraged Hitler to send his military back into the Rhineland in 1936, just as Germany’s blitzkrieg through Western Europe in 1940 emboldened Japan to press into Southeast Asia.”

It was like entering a time warp.

The Republican Party in Washington, especially the Senate, is still the party of George Will, Jonah Goldberg, Bill Kristol and David Frum. We saw Axis of Evil rhetoric straight out of the 2000s. Mitch McConnell and Dan Crenshaw are like Winston Churchill standing up to tyranny in 1941.

The Republican base has changed. The online Right has changed. Lots of mainstream conservative institutions have changed. The politicians have changed too in the House and Senate, but seem to be a lagging indicator. Republican leadership is still mentally in the Cold War in the 1980s.

Since winning the 2022 midterms, the agenda has been banning TikTok, passing around a dozen bills about anti-Semitism on college campuses, expanding government surveillance in the FISA bill and delivering Joe Biden’s agenda by sending $95 billion in foreign aid to war zones or potential war zones around the world. In previous years, the Republican legislative agenda has been things like trillion dollar spending bills, making Juneteenth a federal holiday and passing criminal justice reform.

These people are living in a different political universe. They are responding to donors and very old voters. Many of them undoubtedly just made up their mind about politics in the 1960s and 1970s. My final takeaway is that their victory on Ukraine aid was bought on credit. They didn’t have the political support to do it, but did it anyway out of self-righteous conviction.