The Washington, D.C. winter has placed a chill on relations among Republicans on the Senate side of the Capitol Complex. Sources familiar with the matter told The American Conservative that Wednesday’s Senate Republican Conference meeting devolved into “embarrassing exhortations” over the need to provide Ukraine with more aid against the will of GOP voters.
Both internally and externally, the current divide among the Republican Senate conference—those who want to defend America's border first versus those who would rather tend to Ukraine's border—is becoming a chasm.
Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota, according to a TAC source with direct knowledge of Wednesday’s meeting, “said that sometimes legislators must show their fiscally conservative constituents ‘tough love’ by voting to spend more money on Ukraine because they have a moral obligation to do so.”
He wasn't alone. Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas made an impassioned plea for the Senate GOP Conference to send billions more to Ukraine in order to “make the world safe for democracy,” the source told TAC. When it came time for Sen. Thom Tillis to speak, the senator from North Carolina blamed former President Donald Trump for what transpired during America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
By far the most melodramatic display was from Sen. James Risch of Idaho. Sources told TAC that Risch played an old video of former Arizona Senator John McCain during his presentation to the conference and claimed the GOP conference should move forward with Ukraine aid because it is what the late McCain would have wanted. Mark Salter's words in the Atlantic still ring true: Ukraine was “a country whose independence [McCain] championed as if it were his own.”
Wednesday's circus came on the heels of another unruly Senate Conference Meeting the day prior in which several GOP senators questioned whether McConnell was genuine about border security or simply saw the border as a means to secure more money for Ukraine.
The widening chasm in the GOP conference is causing McConnell to rethink his strategy of linking further supplemental aid to Ukraine to the border and aid to other nations, according to PunchBowl News. “When we started this, the border united us and Ukraine divided us,” McConnell reportedly said—which seems to confirm that, in McConnell’s mind, the border was playing second-fiddle to Ukraine aid.
Now? “The politics on this have changed,” he said. “We’re in a quandary.”