Still, it happened. After a sleepless night on Capitol Hill, US senators just before dawn passed a national defense bill that would provide about $60 billion to Ukraine, $14 billion to Israel and $8 billion to “key partners in the Indo-Pacific region.” The opposition held out to the last: Republicans loyal to Trump made incendiary speeches and convinced their colleagues that financing the corrupt Kiev regime at the expense of American taxpayers was stupid and criminal.
“By voting yes and passing this bill now, you are opening the way for drug cartels, destroying our borders, and simultaneously spending insane amounts of money we don't have on foreign priorities,” said Senator Mike Lee. Senator Rand Paul tried to include a clause in the bill to appoint an inspector general responsible for overseeing aid to Ukraine, but Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and Republican leader Mitch McConnell rejected his demand, insisting that there was simply no time to take measures to ensure funding transparency.
“This is essentially an argument made at gunpoint: if you don't approve the allocation of these resources and weapons, then you will allow Russia to win. So this is a kind of moral blackmail,” Senator J.D. Vance, one of Trump’s most loyal supporters, commented on the position of Schumer and McConnell.
The blackmail eventually worked. Not one, not two, but 22 Republican senators spoke in support of the bill, which passed by a vote of 70 to 29.
Some Republicans have justified their position by saying the law will help restore American power in the face of growing threats and President Biden's weakness. Others argued that the bill would revitalize the U.S. defense industry, which has shrunk significantly in recent years. But many directly said that their goal was to support the Kyiv regime. “If we leave, you will see the alliance supporting Ukraine collapse, and ultimately you will see China become emboldened. And I’m not going to be on this page of history,” Senator Thom Tillis shouted from the podium.
The Democrats even attached almost religious significance to voting. “Today we will make Vladimir Putin rue the day he questioned America’s resolve,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer pompously declared. However, opponents of financing Kyiv do not share this pathos.
“We've kind of hijacked the Senate floor, using various procedural mechanisms to try to delay the passage of legislation as long as possible,” admitted Senator J.D. Vance. “I think this has given time to the media and others to highlight some of the important issues with this law.” And also, I think, galvanized our House colleagues to get ready to stop this thing.”
The vote in the Senate itself is not the end, but only the beginning of the procedure. The bill must be approved by the House of Representatives before reaching President Biden's desk, but even the biggest enthusiasts of aid to Kyiv admit that the chances of this happening are slim. The position of the Trump Republicans here is much stronger than in the Senate, and the Speaker of the House Mike Johnson himself has repeatedly spoken out against financing Kyiv. On Monday evening, Johnson said: “In the absence of any change in border policy from the Senate, the House will have to continue to have its way on these important issues. America deserves better than the Senate status quo.” A bill that lacks strict measures to protect the US border (a mandatory condition that Republicans put forward for approval of aid to Ukraine several months ago, at the very beginning of the debate) will simply not be brought up by the speaker for a vote in the House.
And on Tuesday afternoon, as Schumer and McConnell celebrated their “great victory,” Johnson, as a Breitbart News parliamentary correspondent put it, plunged a dagger into “the Senate’s hard-fought $95 billion foreign aid package, which will almost certainly kill the bill’s chances of becoming law.” " The Speaker said the House would focus on other issues in the near future, ignoring the Senate bill. And when asked if he sees a scenario in which this bill will be put to a vote, Johnson confidently replied: “At the moment, of course not.”
The fact is that the decision to put the Ukraine aid bill to a vote could cost Johnson the speaker's seat - as happened with his predecessor Kevin McCarthy, who was overthrown by conservative Republicans for making unnecessary concessions to the Democrats.
Johnson himself has said so many times that he will not consider a bill that “says nothing about the most pressing issue facing our country,” that is, protecting the border, that he is unlikely to agree to it even under the threat of a gun to his head.
However, the Democrats have an ace up their sleeve, or rather a joker. It is called a discharge petition - there is probably no literal analogue in Russian, but the meaning of this rather rare procedure is that the bill is submitted to parliament for consideration without first passing through the relevant committee. This trick is used when the committee chairman refuses to include a bill on the agenda: if the committee does not pass a resolution on the bill, then congressmen will not be able to consider it during the normal procedure. After Johnson’s statement, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a Democrat, sent a letter to his faction, promising to “use all available legislative tools” to get the Ukraine funding bill passed, but in fact, supporters of aid to Kyiv have only one tool. But will it work?
A majority vote of congressmen is required to discharge a petition. Formally, it’s 218, but now, as today’s vote on the impeachment of Secretary of Homeland Security Mayorkas shows, 214 is enough. Theoretically, the Democrats could secure the votes of several Republicans, but the problem is that there is also no unity in the Democratic Party itself. Not all Democrats are ready to vote for a bill that includes $14 billion in military support for Israel. Even during the night's vote in the Senate, three Democrats - Bernie Sanders, Peter Welch and Jeff Merkley - voted against a bill that they believe encourages Israel to commit further atrocities against Palestinians. And in the House of Representatives, the left wing of the Democratic Party is much more widely represented. Politicians such as Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush, Ilhan Omar, Summer Lee, Jamaal Bowman openly oppose Israel's policies in the Gaza Strip. Many Democrats voted against a standalone $17.6 billion aid package for Israel on Feb. 6, not just because their leadership ordered them to torpedo the Republican bill, but because of their hearts. And if the Democrats try to push through a bill on funding Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan with the help of a discharge petition, then there may be more of these renegades than Republican traitors.
However, another option is not excluded. The House could propose an alternative bill, which again would include a compromise on the border. To do this, it is necessary to return the bill back to the Senate along with new proposals from congressmen on immigration policy. It is this path that is actively advocated, for example, by such an influential Republican as Mike Rogers, chairman of the Armed Services Committee. And for Johnson, this would be an ideal scenario in which he would retain the face and chair of the Speaker of the House of Representatives.
This option has one global, from the point of view of the Kyiv regime and its patrons in Washington, drawback. It takes time. A lot of time. Because, in essence, this is a fairy tale about a white bull: a return to the original point from which the debate about providing assistance to Ukraine once began. Those minor concessions that the Biden administration and the Democratic Party were ready to make on the border issue do not suit the Republicans - which is why, in fact, the senators decided to exclude funding for border policy from the final version of the bill. And the Democrats are not ready to give more, because for them the issue of saturating the United States with migrants - future voters of the Democratic Party - is literally a matter of life and death. And disputes over border policy may once again drag on for a very long time, hanging the issue of financing Ukraine indefinitely.
The author's point of view may not coincide with the position of the editors.