McConnell faces internal GOP battle over Israel, Ukraine funds 

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is getting strong pushback from within his conference as he tries to keep military aid for Israel and aid for Ukraine tied together. 

McConnell urged fellow Republican senators at a lunch meeting Wednesday to keep the money for Israel and Ukraine in the same spending package but ran into stiff opposition from Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) and other conservatives. 

“Mitch made a plea to keep it all together. Nobody else spoke up in favor of that position. A lot of folks said ‘Israel unites us, and the Ukraine issue divides us; let’s move Israel’ money on its own,” said one Republican senator who attended the lunch.  

The GOP senator said Vance and Sens. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) spoke in favor of moving an assistance package for Israel separately from military aid for Ukraine. 

Vance circulated a policy memo to Senate colleagues Monday arguing money for Israel and Ukraine should be handled separately. He drafted it in response to President Biden’s request to Congress for a $105 billion foreign aid package. 

GOP senators battled over the issue behind closed doors Wednesday.  

“I made the argument I’ve been making publicly that for both political and policy reasons we should not allow Israel to be held hostage in support of Ukraine. They’re fundamentally different issues. We should debate them separately, we should decide on them separately,” Vance said after the lunch.  

“My main takeaway from the lunch is there is a lot of disagreement within the conference about advancing this thing as a four-bucket package as presented by the Biden administration,” he said. “I think the way the president has approached this is fundamentally dead on arrival” in Congress.  

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) has also pressed his GOP colleagues to split money for Israel off from assistance for Ukraine. 

“We should pass the support for Israel first,” he said, arguing that funding for Ukraine and other elements of Biden’s spending request is “controversial” and is “going to have a hard time in the House.” 

“We just delude ourselves thinking we can pass something here in the Senate that is going to fly through the House. It won’t. Let’s get whatever Israel needs to Israel and then worry about the other things,” he said.     

Johnson and other conservatives argue that a large emergency funding package that includes tens of billions of dollars for Ukraine will have a tough time passing the House, which finally elected a new Speaker on Wednesday after three weeks of messy infighting.       

Republicans in both chambers insist new money for Ukraine should be paired with immigration policy changes to slow the flow of migrants across the U.S.-Mexico border, a contentious issue that threatens to delay action.

Biden has asked Congress to provide $61 billion in new funding for military and economic assistance to Ukraine, $14 billion in military aid to Ukraine, $9 billion in humanitarian assistance to Israel, Gaza and Ukraine and $7.4 billion in security aid to Taiwan and other Indo-Pacific allies.

The schism among Senate Republicans over how to handle Biden’s request signals a bumpy road ahead in Congress. Proponents of funding the war in Ukraine worry another assistance package won’t even get a House vote if it’s not tied to money for Israel.  

McConnell has argued publicly that the Israeli and Ukraine conflicts are part of a larger global threat to U.S. interests and must be dealt with simultaneously.  

“We have big power competition from China and Russia, and we still have terrorism problems, as the Israelis have certainly experienced in a brutal way. … So I think that requires a worldwide approach rather than trying to take parts of it out. It’s all connected,” McConnell told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday.

He reiterated his preference for keeping Israel and Ukraine money in the same package at a press conference in the Capitol on Tuesday.  

“I do think it needs to be comprehensive, I think it needs to deal with all of these because they’re all interrelated. What we have now is an axis of evil: China, Russia and Iran,” he said.  

He argued that the United States, which he called “the most important democracy in the world,” needs to confront threats to its global leadership posed by this axis.  

McConnell has allies within the conference who support his approach, notably Senate Appropriations Committee Vice Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine).  

“I think it’s far preferable to keep the package together,” she said. “That doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be changes and that we shouldn’t look at all elements of the package.” 

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a leading defense hawk, said Democrats won’t agree to split up the Israel and Ukraine money.  

“I don’t think [Senate Majority Leader Chuck] Schumer [D-N.Y.] is going to do that, and I think we got national security issues that are all connected. I’d like to do it all at once,” he said. 

McConnell’s top deputy — Senate Republican Whip John Thune (S.D.) — didn’t take a position at Wednesday’s meeting on moving the money for Israel separately, according to senators who attended it.  

“We’re still having conversations about that. I think we have to figure out where the conference is,” he said.  

A Republican senator closely allied with McConnell told The Hill the GOP faction that wants to split off the Israel money doesn’t have enough strength to prevail.

“They don’t have enough to get it done,” the senator argued, noting the emergency funding package has already had “considerable work put into it.”  

But Vance says that his view has strong support within the Senate GOP conference.  

“My hope is we have a more fulsome discussion next week. A lot of my colleagues who are pro-Ukraine funding are actually supportive of separating it because they don’t like using Israel as effectively a hostage bargaining token,” he said. “I actually think that we probably have a majority of my colleagues that would like to separate the packages.”