Saturday morning and afternoon action/delay followed by more action/delay in the House of Representatives and Saturday afternoon and evening action/delay followed by more action/delay in the Senate (and a pre-midnight signature from President Joe Biden with less than a hour to spare) kept the U.S. government from Kevin McCarthy’s shutdown, but America’s honor and security took a blow as any military aid for beleaguered Ukraine was excluded to appease the GOP appeasement caucus.
Federal employees and the millions who rely on them were spared, but the defenders of Ukraine may have been sacrificed. For shame.
As 90 radical Republicans voted against the stopgap bill and to close down the government, there was a sole Democrat who joined them. He didn’t want to shutter the government or torment Speaker McCarthy, but rather he objected to this abdication of American responsibility. Chicago Congressman Mike Quigley was right that, “The fight in Ukraine is our fight and anyone who tries to argue that a choice must be made between Ukraine and the American people is presenting a false dilemma. Protecting Ukraine is in our national interest.”
He added, correctly, “This bill is a victory for Putin and Putin-sympathizers everywhere. We now have 45 days to correct this grave mistake.”
After it passed with a majority of the Republicans and all the other Democrats, the measure went to the Senate, where all 100 members needed to agree for a floor vote. But it was held up by a principled Democrat, who, like Quigley, objected to this abdication of American responsibility. Coloradan Michael Bennet refused to go along until the bipartisan leadership of the Senate committed to resume assistance to Ukraine.
Winning that assurance, the roll was called, with Bennet voting yes. After the vote, as the bill was sent off to the White House, Bennet took the floor and spoke of his mom, “who is still alive, was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1938. She was a Polish Jew.” But for her parents and an aunt, all in her family were murdered by the Germans. And she now tells her son of Putin’s war, “I can’t believe I lived long enough to see this. I almost can’t believe it either because we had gotten used to reliance on our international organizations, the rule of law, the idea that democracy had spread, the idea that capitalism had spread.”
The Truman Doctrine, from 1947, says, in the words of the State Department, that “the United States would provide political, military and economic assistance to all democratic nations under threat from external or internal authoritarian forces.”
Bennet’s mom survived when dictators weren’t opposed in time. All aid for Ukraine.