Ardent neocon and GOP Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell appeared on television Sunday to explain why House Republicans dropped their opposition to giving away nearly $100 billion in additional US taxpayer dollars to foreign countries while the crisis at the US’ southern border with Mexico remains unaddressed.
“Once we realized we were not going to get a border result, I think our members really started focusing on the package. It was clear that it was not going to have a border provision attached to it. And there are almost no good arguments against this,” McConnell told CBS’ Face the Nation, assuring that all the arguments made by opponents of the $95 billion foreign package were “provably wrong.”
Admitting that the border with Mexico is “a disaster,” McConnell said he and his colleagues recognized that Democrats wouldn’t accommodate GOP concerns on the frontier. “They’ve got the White House, they got the Senate.”
Saying that he’d spoken to Volodymyr Zelensky before Sunday’s CBS interview, McConnell said he “apologized” to the Ukrainian president for taking such a long time to get the spending package through ($61 billion of the $95 billion is formally earmarked for Ukraine, although the US military-industrial complex is expected to get a good chunk of that to replenish depleted Pentagon stocks).
McConnell characterized the “powerful voices” within his own party calling on the US to step back from its global imperious commitments as “isolationists,” and said it was a phenomenon that the GOP has had experience with going back to mid-20th century.
“We may not have time for a history lesson, but we’ve been there before. Before World War II and after World War II, the most prominent Republican of that era was Robert Taft. He opposed Lend Lease. He opposed NATO. He opposed the Marshall Plan. So that strand of isolationism prior to this last really big war was stopped when [Dwight D.] Eisenhower beat Taft for the nomination and had a totally different view of our role in the world and that’s been the case of most presidents since then,” McConnell said.
Border Catastrophe
The small group of hardline conservative House Republicans who voted against last week’s $95 billion foreign aid package characterized the bill’s passage as a betrayal of America’s national interests, calling the entry of millions of illegal immigrants into the US since President Biden took office in 2021 an “invasion” that’s far more important to address through legislation.
GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson did his best to placate House Republicans concerned over the passage of additional aid to Ukraine, unbundling the $95 billion package into four separate bills, and stipulating that of the $61 billion in aid to Ukraine, $9.5 billion in economic assistance would come in the form of a loan, which the president could forgive after the next election.
McConnell patted himself and the neoconservative members of his caucus on the back after the passage of Ukraine aid last week, calling it “one of the most important issues” of his 30 year Senate career.
Russia slammed the US legislation as a sign that permanent Washington plans to continue its gruesome proxy war against Moscow “to the last Ukrainian.”