Biden, Democrats want to help Ukraine, fight the pandemic. Republicans, eh, not so much

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President Joe Biden laid out his urgent request for $33 billion in aid to Ukraine and $10 billion for COVID-19 measures on Thursday. Republicans responded as predicted: No. Not unless they get their way.

It’s slightly more nuanced than that, but not a lot. Their position amply illustrates that the only things motivating them are racism and partisanship. Take the pandemic. They’re arguing it’s serious enough to force President Joe Biden to continue the Trump-era anti-immigrant using the public health emergency order known as Title 42 to migrants and asylum-seekers from entering the country. But the pandemic isn’t enough of a crisis to keep funding the government’s efforts to curtail it. Not that Republicans are seriously arguing that the pandemic is behind their efforts. They have no problem simply being racist about it. If that means taking urgent aid to Ukraine hostage, so be it.

In order to get both of these things done in a timely manner—i.e. by Memorial Day—Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is likely to link the two must-pass bills. The Senate is scheduled to be in most of the month (the Fridays they routinely take off excepted) but the House has planned just eight days of legislative work, with three days of committee work, in May. So timing is a problem.

Some Democrats are a problem, too, with five of them—Maggie Hassan, Mark Kelly, Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and Jon Tester—joining Republicans in a bill to usurp Biden’s administrative authority in immigration policy. They are helping Republicans. Period. And they are complicating getting this critical work done, because whatever passes the Senate also has to pass the House, and Democrats there are not willing to endorse Republican racism.

Rep. Veronica Escobar a Democrat who actually represents a border district in Texas, explains. “We’ve tried the Republican strategy,” she told the Washington Post. “The Republican strategy has been to build walls and harden the border. That hasn’t worked. And if you look at Title 42 over the last two-and-a-half years that it’s been in place, it has not slowed migration, deterred it, or eliminated it. So we have to do something different.” She and other members, including Sen. Bob Menendez, argue that the policy does more harm than good. Menendez told the Post that Title 42 is “part of the problem, not the solution.”

For one thing, the official report showing that 1.8 million migrants have been expelled under Title 42 is misleading and inflates the numbers. Escobar explained that it reflects multiple attempts by some migrants, who have been turned back numerous times. Menendez agrees. “There is no immigration law on the books that allows people to cross the border multiple times without consequence,” he said in a statement to the Post. “Why would any lawmaker who supports border security want to preserve such a policy?”

Schumer, who has been advocating that Biden drop the policy, is now trying to find a compromise. “We’re going to be working through this to see if we can come to a position that our caucus can agree on,” he told reporters on Wednesday. “There’s divisions there now.” House Speaker Pelosi also supports an end to the policy. “President Biden did the right thing” in setting an end date for it, she told reporters Friday. She added, “we haven’t made any decision about how we go forward” in dealing with it. She also said, “I’m all for” combining the COVID-19 request with the Ukraine supplemental. “We will have to come to terms with how to do that.”

While leadership has to figure out how to deal with those Democrats, the Republicans are happy to keep obstructing. Even the “good” ones, the “bipartisan” ones. “I think what we need to do is, we need to get Ukraine taken care of and that has to be a priority,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowsk (R-AK). “We need to have a priority on getting the Ukraine assistance out. So things that slow things down—let’s not slow things down.” So some more people needlessly die from COVID-19 because we’ve run out of money to fight it. Whatever.

“I think the prospects of each being passed would be greater if they were kept separate, and if each had the potential for amendments,” said another “good” Republican, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT). He worked on the $10 billion COVID-19 relief deal with Schumer in early April. The one that hasn’t passed. The one his fellow Republicans have been fighting, but sure, it has a great chance of passing on its own with at least 10 Republican votes.

So there’s the congressional agenda for the next month, pretty much the same as the congressional agenda for all the months.

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