Biden to request more Ukraine aid when Congress gets back next week
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President Joe Biden announced Thursday that the U.S. is sending another $800 million in lethal aid and security assistance to Ukraine, and $500 million in economic assistance “to help stabilize their economy, to support communities that have been devastated by the Russian onslaught, and pay the brave workers that continue to provide essential services to the people of Ukraine.”
“With this latest disbursement, I’ve almost exhausted the draw-down authority I have that Congress authorized for Ukraine and a bipartisan spending bill last month,” Biden said. He announced that he will send a supplemental budget request to Congress next week “to keep weapons and ammunition flowing without interruption to the brave Ukrainian fighters and to continue to deliver economic assistance to the Ukrainian people.”
Then he thanked Congress ”Democrats and Republicans—for their support for the people of Ukraine.” We’ll see how much thanks Republicans deserve with this next request, which Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says will be coupled with the administration’s other urgent supplemental funding request for COVID-19 pandemic funds.
The White House has been clamoring for weeks for more funding—for vaccines, treatments, and research and development funding for vaccines—warning that they wouldn’t be able to respond to a potential autumn surge or new variant without the assistance. In early March, they were asking for $22.5 billion, it’s now been whittled down by Republicans to $10 billion, and they keep finding poison pills to delay passing it.
The obvious path, which Schumer intends to take, is to tie the Ukraine aid with “funding to address Covid-19 and food insecurity globally” and to pass it as soon as possible when Congress is back next week. Republicans will continue to resist, with a likely assist from jittery Senate Democrats.
“If that [Covid aid] discussion is going to take a matter of weeks, we have to make a decision on Ukrainian support in a matter of hours or days,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) told reporters on a call from the Balkans. On the same call, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) showed she’s wobbling. “I support a package to address continued research and investment and therapeutics and vaccinations that we need for Covid … but I also think it’s very important to get this aid out to Ukraine as quickly as possible.”
Some Democrats have also been a problem on that COVID-19 funding, helping Republicans fight Biden in ending Title 42, the Trump-era policy created by Stephen Miller “that has for more than two years used the pandemic as an excuse to stomp on U.S. asylum law,” as Gabe Ortiz explains.
Senate Republicans derailed a COVID-19 package just before Congress left for the Easter recess, refusing to allow a vote on the aid unless they get an amendment vote to force Biden to reinstate the Title 42 restrictions.
Republicans also dragged out important Russian sanctions bills ending that nation’s permanent normal trade status with the U.S., but finally passed it the day before they headed off for their two-week recess. Dragging all this critical legislation out is Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s only election strategy—to prevent Biden from achieving things as much as possible.
As far as Biden’s request for more Ukraine aid goes, on Thursday Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi promised a quick vote next week. “We want to do more. The president said he will be asking Congress for more. We will learn about that in the next day or so, to be taken up as soon as we can next week,” Pelosi said. Her spokesperson Drew Hammill cautioned that there was “no specific timeline for a floor vote at this time,” pending Biden’s request. Nevertheless, the House is poised to act, which will put more pressure on the Senate.
But Schumer’s plan on COVID-19 funding will have to be worked out with Pelosi, as well, since the two have ceded critical ground on the funding for it—they’ve agreed that new money can’t be appropriated and it will have to come out of the previous funding packages. Which means clawing funding back from somewhere. House Democrats scuttled the first effort when leadership tried to rush through a bill that would have stripped already-budgeted funding from about 30 state and local governments.
Funding for Ukraine (and for the defense industry) won’t be a hard fight—money for guns is never a hard fight. Fighting a global pandemic, however, is not something Republicans are interested in. So Democrats should make it politically painful for them to refuse funding.
The best way to do that is to cry “fraud, waste, and abuse” by private corporations in the previous rounds of emergency spending. There’s been plenty of that. Where that money should come from is the likely $76 billion claimed fraudulently in pandemic Paycheck Protection Program loans. (Disclosure: Kos Media received a Paycheck Protection Program loan. Not fraudulently.)
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