There are two world leaders whose fate may well rest in the hands of Congress and American voters: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his mortal enemy Russian President Vladimir Putin.
It’s abundantly clear Putin is pinning his hopes on outlasting Ukraine on two future eventualities favored by the ultra-MAGA wing of the Republican Party — a cutoff of all U.S. aid to Ukraine, and a return of Donald Trump to the White House.
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Zelensky is worried about both possibilities.
Trump has vowed, if elected, to end the war in 24 hours, something that realistically could only be done on terms highly favorable to Russia.
In an interview with NBC, Zelensky said if Trump came to Kyiv, he could explain to him in “24 minutes” why it’s not possible to make peace with Putin, who he called a “f***ing terrorist.”
But Zelensky’s more immediate concern is the current standoff in Congress where a small but powerful bloc of House Republicans, dubbed “MAGA extremists” by Democrats — and even some members of their own party — are opposed to any further aid to Ukraine. They are in a position to kill any bill — but only if the new speaker of the House lets them.
“We need much more to win now. … We do need ammunition. We do need air defense,” Oksana Markarova, Ukraine's ambassador to the U.S., said on CBS’s Face the Nation. “Right now, all the eyes are on U.S. Congress.”
President Joe Biden has requested $105 billion in emergency funds for Ukraine, Israel, countering China, increasing border security, and building more submarines. But the bulk of the money, more than $61 billion, would go to support Ukraine’s war effort into next year, plus several billion more for humanitarian aid for Ukrainian civilians.
All the priorities in the Biden supplemental budget request enjoy wide bipartisan support in both the House and the Senate and would pass by supermajorities. Yet under an informal understanding known as the Hastert Rule (named for former Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert), no bill can come to the House floor unless it passes solely with Republican votes.
When at the end of September then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) ran afoul of the Hastert Rule by using Democratic votes to avert a government shutdown, it cost him his job.
When the House voted on a $300 million Ukraine bill in late September, it passed in a blowout 311-117. Still, it failed the Hastert test by not garnering a majority of Republican votes.
“You cannot use Democrats to roll a majority of the majority, certainly on something as consequential as Ukraine," said Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL). Gaetz noted that 101 Republicans voted for the Ukraine aid while 117 voted against it.
“Ukraine has lost the support of a majority of the majority,” Gaetz said on the House floor in the days before he engineered the ouster of McCarthy as speaker, sending him back to being a rank-and-file House member.
The new speaker, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA), who has voted against Ukraine aid in the past, now says he supports it.
“We can’t allow Vladimir Putin to prevail in Ukraine because I don’t believe it would stop there. And it would probably encourage and empower China to perhaps make a move on Taiwan,” Johnson told Fox News host Sean Hannity in his first interview after being elected speaker. “We’re not going to abandon them.”
But Johnson is using a different tactic to keep his razor-thin majority unified, separating the various aid requests and marrying them to pet causes of the MAGA wing. Which in the case of Ukraine means linking any aid to the provision of H.R. 2, a House bill on border security that was a top priority of the new Republican majority, but was flatly rejected by Senate Democrats.
The Biden request does include $14 billion for border security, but the administration proposes to spend the money on 1,300 additional Border Patrol agents, 375 immigration judge teams, 1,600 asylum officers, and 100 fentanyl detection machines.
The House bill would restart construction of the Trump border wall and greatly tighten the eligibility requirements for immigrants to be granted asylum and allowed to stay in the U.S.
“The bill would cut off nearly all access to humanitarian protections in ways that are inconsistent with our Nation’s values and international obligations,” the White House said in a statement promising to veto the measure if it ever passed the Senate.
The Senate is drawing up its own Ukraine funding measure that Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) had been touting as bipartisan. That is until Schumer was blindsided by a proposal from Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Tom Cotton (R-AR), and James Lankford (R-OK) to link the Ukraine aid to a border security plan that mirrors the House bill.
“Instead of putting together common-sense border policies that can pass in divided government, Senate Republicans basically copied and pasted the House's radical H.R. 2 bill, all at the expense of Ukrainian freedom, independence, democracy,” Schumer fumed. “We are open to talking about the border, but it has to be bipartisan. They just sort of plucked things out of H.R. 2, which they knew was unacceptable, didn't talk to a single Democrat, and said, ‘Hey, take it or leave it.’”
At a Senate Appropriations Committee meeting earlier this month, the panel's chairwoman, Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), said, “Let us be clear: Huge supermajorities in the House and Senate favor more support for Ukraine, so getting this funding across the finish line should not be controversial.”
Nevertheless, none of the bickering and infighting bodes well for the eventual passage of a substantial Ukrainian aid package, despite the support of old-school Republicans including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME).
“American support for Ukraine is not charity,” McConnell said after Zelensky’s September visit to Capitol Hill. “It’s an investment in our own direct interests — not least because degrading Russia’s military power helps to deter our primary strategic adversary, China.”
“The supplemental request includes more than $30 billion to replenish our military's weapons stockpiles and invests in and strengthens the U.S. defense industrial base in many states,” Collins argued. “None of this funding goes overseas or to another country. It makes America stronger by modernizing our arsenal of democracy right here in our country.”
In their congressional testimony this month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin argued that any wavering in support for Ukraine would send a dangerous message to allies and adversaries alike.
“We now stand at a moment where many are again making the bet that we're too divided or too distracted at home to stay the course. That's what's at stake,” Blinken testified. While Austin warned, “American leadership is what holds the world together, and if we fail to lead, the cost and threats to the United States will only grow. We must not give our friends, our rivals, or our foes any reason to doubt America's resolve.”
As for Zelensky, in his NBC interview, he said to American leaders, “Your help is very important for the next year, and that is crucial.” He added, “Now, it's a very important moment not to lose the will.”
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Zelensky then offered a final warning on what a lack of U.S. aid to Ukraine would mean.
“If Russia kills all of us, they will attack NATO countries, and you will send your sons and daughters,” he said. “And it will be, I'm sorry, but the price will be higher. That is my signal. Believe in democracy, believe in Ukraine.”