Mike Johnson, man in the middle of a congressional quagmire.
Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Concerns about the urgent need for more U.S. aid for Ukraine became official this week as Office of Management and Budget director Shalanda Young warned congressional leaders the money was running out, reports The Hill:
“I want to be clear: without congressional action, by the end of the year we will run out of resources to procure more weapons and equipment for Ukraine and to provide equipment from U.S. military stocks. There is no magical pot of funding available to meet this moment. We are out of money — and nearly out of time,” Young wrote.
“We are out of money to support Ukraine in this fight. This isn’t a next year problem,” she added. “The time to help a democratic Ukraine fight against Russian aggression is right now. It is time for Congress to act.”
This isn’t just fear-mongering, either. Security experts outside the U.S. government believe Ukraine will soon be in dire straits militarily without more aid, and also that a failure to come through by the U.S. will be interpreted by Vladimir Putin as a sign that western support for his enemy is weakening at a crucial moment. Army War College professor John Nagl went so far as to tell my colleague Benjamin Hart in an interview, “If Ukraine is going to lose this war, it’s going to lose it in the House of Representatives.”
The House is the fulcrum of this set of issues for complicated reasons. President Biden has asked for supplemental (i.e. non-budgeted) assistance for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan (along with a few emergency domestic needs). A bill to supply that money is pending in the Senate, but Republicans are threatening to defeat or filibuster it unless border security assistance is also included, accompanied by changes in asylum and immigration policies that most Democrats oppose. Negotiations to find a border-security compromise went on for weeks in the Senate but then were suspended, in part because House Republicans were making it clear they wouldn’t buy the deal unless their own harsh border-security demands (contained in legislation that earlier passed the House on a strict party-line vote) were part of the bargain.
With progress toward a supplemental spending deal stalled, the clock is ticking down until the Christmas–New Year holidays shut Congress down. And even if the border-security talks get unstuck (and/or Democrats just decide to cave to the fury of immigration-reform activists), there’s another layer of problems in the House. Speaker Mike Johnson is trying to get an overall spending deal in place to avoid a government shutdown in January and February when the stopgap spending authority he managed to secure in mid-November expires. The hard-core House Freedom Caucus members who have been fighting for deep spending cuts all year have tentatively agreed to roll back some of their demands for across-the-board cuts if — and only if — Congress holds the line on additional spending, which includes supplemental appropriations requests. And that brings the controversy back to Ukraine aid, which most MAGA types have opposed from the get-go.
So there are two House Republican–generated obstacles to getting Ukraine the aid it needs: the border-security impasse and potential House demands that Ukraine spending be significantly reduced or offset with spending cuts (e.g. the IRS spending cuts the House earlier linked to a standalone bill to help Israel) that Democrats cannot accept. Freshly minted Speaker Mike Johnson (a very recent convert of questionable sincerity to the cause of helping Ukraine) has already deeply annoyed the right flank of his conference by securing stopgap spending bills with Democratic support. It seems unlikely the politicians who took down Kevin McCarthy will give him perpetual slack to placate the Biden White House and the Senate on Ukraine, which again, most of them would just as soon abandon anyway.
All of these complications will bring a smile to the face of Vladimir Putin, who is reportedly hoping Mike Johnson’s presidential candidate, Donald Trump, wins next November and unravels the western alliance backing Ukraine. A less disastrous but still damaging erosion of that alliance may be on tap in Washington as the New Year begins.
