Senators fume after McCarthy jams them on Ukraine aid

Lawmakers who back U.S. aid to Ukraine are fuming over a serious weekend setback that they say leaves President Biden facing an uphill battle to win more money amid deepening political divisions over Kyiv, particularly in the House.

Senators in both parties who back Ukraine went into last weekend thinking they could jam a Senate bill that prevented a shutdown and included $6 billion for Ukraine through the House, where Republicans in the majority had been unable to unify on a single plan to avert a shutdown.

In the Senate, the bipartisan bill appeared likely to be passed, and its proponents believed there would be heavy pressure on the House GOP to accept it as the hours ticked down to a shutdown.

Instead, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) pulled a Saturday morning surprise, announcing he would bring a clean stopgap measure to prevent a shutdown to the floor without Ukraine aid.

He brought the bill up under the suspension of House rules, requiring a two-thirds majority and effectively daring Democrats, who had been decrying a possible shutdown, to oppose it over the lack of funding for Ukraine — which would have given the GOP an opening to argue Democrats were siding with that country over their own.

It also had the effect of jamming the Senate — including GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and other Republicans in the Senate who backed Ukraine aid and had included it in their own stopgap measure.

In the end, McConnell advised his caucus to vote against invoking cloture on the Senate bill to see what the House produced, and Democrats rallied around the McCarthy bill. While 90 House Republicans voted against it, only one House Democrat did — Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.), who blamed the lack of funding for Ukraine.

It was a big victory for McCarthy, and one that is likely to just make it harder to win funding for Ukraine going forward.

McCarthy and other Republicans are now demanding that new money for Ukraine be linked to policy changes to bolster security along the U.S.-Mexico border, a difficult topic where lawmakers for decades have struggled to compromise. Republicans specifically want to make it more difficult for migrants seeking asylum to remain in the United States.  

Tightening the nation’s asylum laws is highly unpopular with Democrats, who would want some concessions on immigration — such as a path to citizenship for migrants who came to the country at a young age — in return.

The failure to include funding for Ukraine just a week after the Eastern European country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, made a dramatic trip to Washington to ask for support has been closely observed on the other side of the Atlantic, where there are worries about the resolve of Kyiv’s allies.

Britain’s public news service, the BBC, on Sunday called the lack of funding for Ukraine a “budget fiasco.” Others said the Congress had handed a victory to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In the Senate, there was plenty of finger-pointing.

Some Senate Republicans who support more funding for Ukraine argued Monday that House Democrats should have voted against McCarthy’s clean measure. They say the Democrats undercut Biden by not insisting the measure include new money for Ukraine. 

Secretary of State Antony Blinken told McConnell in the days before the Sept. 30 shutdown deadline that Ukraine urgently needed more money to continue fighting the war. 

That’s a reason why McConnell agreed to support a Senate-drafted stopgap measure that included $6 billion for Ukraine, even though initially he just wanted to grant the Pentagon expanded transfer authority to continue providing weapons to Ukraine, according to people familiar with the negotiations.  

Senate Republicans who backed funding for the war don’t think Biden did enough to communicate the urgency of the situation in Ukraine to members of Congress more broadly.  

“The key is we’re running low on the money and we’ve already slow-walked everything we could,” said one Republican senator who requested anonymity to discuss the increasingly dire funding situation for the war. 

Democrats, for their part, were blaming Senate GOP conservatives who delayed votes on the bipartisan Senate measure.

“The element of the Senate Republicans that was working with McCarthy undermined Ukraine,” said a Democratic aide, referring to the efforts of Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) to stall the Senate bill and instead promote a funding bill without Ukraine money.  

The sudden turn of events angered Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) enough that he held up the stopgap funding bill for several hours Saturday to negotiate more money for Ukraine. 

Democrats are also blaming McCarthy for putting a continuing resolution on the floor that didn’t include any money for Ukraine.  

“It was Speaker McCarthy who took Ukraine aid out and undermined the overwhelming will of members of Congress,” the Democratic aide said.  

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) on Saturday portrayed the passage of the 45-day continuing resolution as a victory for Democrats because it didn’t include the steep cuts in spending — approaching 30 percent reductions — for many nondefense programs.  

He also said Democrats are committed to supporting the war in Ukraine.  

“We need to address the security situation in Ukraine to ensure that the Ukrainian people can continue to fight bravely and courageously and defeat Vladimir Putin and Russian aggression,” he said.

An administration official pushed back on the Republican claim that Biden needs to do a better job at communicating to fellow Democrats the urgency of approving more money for Ukraine.  

Biden has spoken regularly about the critical importance of funding Ukraine and has used the platform of the White House to amplify that message.  

The president said Sunday that McCarthy had promised to hold a “separate vote” on Ukraine funding, but White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to say if Biden had struck some kind of separate deal with the Speaker on that matter.   

Biden could have asked House Democrats to vote against the House GOP bill over Ukraine.

But Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, questioned whether the president was in much of a position to make such a demand, with the government on the brink of a shutdown.  

“I don’t know that Biden was in a position to demand funding for Ukraine as his top priority, given the other stakes associated with the shutdown,” he said.