House Republicans Fed Up With Biden's Ukraine Aid Requests
16:10 GMT 18.09.2023 (Updated: 16:22 GMT 18.09.2023)
© AP Photo / Jose Luis Magana
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As the US government’s September 30 funding deadline nears, the Biden administration is seeking to ram a $24 billion Ukraine package through the US Congress. Not so fast, say House Republicans.
House Republicans and Democrats have locked horns again over federal budget spending. At midnight on September 30, the US government may shut down unless Congress passes spending legislation.
Each party appears to be trying to capitalize on the urgency of the moment. The White House and Democratic Party want to swiftly pass $44 billion in emergency funding, which includes a $24 billion package for the Kiev regime, requested by President Joe Biden in early August. A lesser amount, $16 billion, has been requested by the White House to replenish FEMA's depleted Disaster Relief Fund and to cope with the consequences of the wildfires on Maui and in Louisiana, flooding in Vermont, and a major hurricane in Florida.
House Republicans believe that it's not fair to wrap up domestic aid and aid to Ukraine in one bill and insist that they should be separated.
"This needs to get done. It needs to get done separately. It needs to get done in a bipartisan manner," GOP Senator Rick Scott told the press.
For his part, Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who has repeatedly made it clear that he does not want to throw US taxpayer dollars into the black hole of the Ukraine conflict, has proposed a compromise solution: pass a stopgap measure first to give them more time to negotiate on further government funding.
"We’re going to get this done, nobody wins in a government shutdown," McCarthy told reporters last week.
"I think it does reflect a certain part of American society," James George Jatras, retired US diplomat and adviser to the US Senate Republican leadership, told Sputnik. "The question is how much of the American establishment does it reflect? And that is very unclear. All the indications I've gotten from people with informants inside the government indicate that they still want to win this war and still believe that they are able to do so, but that it's necessary to freeze the war or to arrange some kind of a phony Minsk-3 kind of ceasefire.”
McCarthy is backed by members of the Republican Main Street Caucus and House Freedom Caucus. The proposed bill would extend the government funding through October 31, impose an almost 8% spending cut on most of the federal agencies (excluding the Pentagon), and, importantly, it would not include additional aid to Ukraine.
The US press reports that supporting Ukraine is becoming "more controversial" among US lawmakers. "I’m a no on any spending for Ukraine, that’s one of my red lines," Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia told the media earlier this month. The House Freedom Caucus shares a similar stance. So does a majority of the US public, who tell pollsters that the United States has already provided Kiev with enough funding.
Ukraine's botched counteroffensive has added to doubts, along with soaring prices and borrowing costs, economic slowdown, and inflation. An August survey found that 55% of Americans thought lawmakers should not authorize additional funding to support Ukraine.
"There is a growing rift perhaps among the public, who realizes how corrupt the Ukrainian regime is, how much all of this is a waste, how, even to some extent, it's a danger of a broader war if it continues," Jatras said.
Still, some Senate Republicans seem to be fine with more military assistance to Kiev. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas shared a letter in a post on X (formerly known as Twitter) insisting that not sending weapons to the Kiev regime would "prolong the war and cost lives." Senators Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C) share Cotton's stance.
Having realized that Ukraine's much-anticipated counteroffensive has failed, the bipartisan establishment is drumming up support for more weapons to Kiev no matter what.
"There is, you might say, a rift in terms of strategy, about how to accomplish the goal of defeating Russia in Ukraine, but there is no rift on that question," Jatras said. "The establishment is still virtually 100% anti-Russian. They want to blame any failure so far on the Ukrainians, especially this idea that the Ukrainians are casualty-averse and they're not willing to throw enough men into the meat grinder, and that they need to listen to people from Washington about how to run the war. But nonetheless, the fundamental question of how to proceed in Ukraine, there is no rift."
"The signals I read are that they realize that this so-called counteroffensive is not going to succeed on its own terms, and they have to switch to a different strategy. And that different strategy is to force Moscow into a disadvantage, a frozen conflict. And they think they can succeed in that and that they're preparing for a longer-term conflict," he continued.
Even though the public discontent in the US is growing against funding Kiev, the White House and the "war party" in Congress don't give "a damn," according to the expert. The question is to what extent the US elites could push ahead with the unpopular measure as domestic problems continue to mount.
18 September 2023, 15:24 GMT
