I have said it in the past, and as recently as today: Ukraine cannot win no matter how much aid we give them, and Israel will not lose, even if we give them no support. Thus, we shouldn’t be helping either Ukraine or Israel.
Alas! the warmongers in Congress just love them some more spending to help Ukraine in its stalemated war against Russia, and there are enough Republicans among them for more aid to Ukraine to pass, unless Speaker Mike Johnson flat prevents a vote. But Conservatives have come up with a new tactic:
Republicans want to pair border security with aid for Ukraine. Here’s why that makes a deal so tough
Congress return to work this week after the holiday break, and Senate Republicans have made clear they won’t support additional war aid for Ukraine unless they can pair it with border security measures
by Mary Clare Jalonick and Stephen Groves, Associated Press | Sunday, November 26, 2023 | 8:52 AM EST
WASHINGTON — As Congress returns to session this week, lawmakers will be trying to forge an agreement on sending a new round of wartime assistance to Ukraine. But to succeed, they will have to find agreement on an issue that has confounded them for decades.
Republicans in both chambers of Congress have made clear that they will not support additional aid for Ukraine unless it is paired with border security measures to help manage the influx of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. Their demand has injected one of the most contentious issues in American politics into a foreign policy debate that was already difficult.
Time is short for a deal.
A small, bipartisan group in the Senate is taking the lead and working to find a narrow compromise that can overcome a likely filibuster by winning 60 votes. But even if they can reach a modest agreement, there is no guarantee it would pass the House, where Republicans are insisting on wholesale changes to U.S. border and immigration policies.
There’s more at the original.
As my good friend and occasional blog pinch hitter William Teach has noted many times, the so-called “sanctuary cities” to which Governor Greg Abbott (R-TX) has shipped some, but nowhere near all, of the illegal immigrants ‘migrants’ who have crossed into the United States have found that the ‘migrants’ cost time, space, and money to house, and other budget items are having to be cut. But those are primarily the local officeholders, the big-city mayors who have to actually deal with the situation on the ground. far too many of the Democrats in Congress are more concerned with leaving the border wide open, because they aren’t the ones who have to deal with the problems themselves. And, as we noted on Saturday, wanting to do something really radical like protect your country’s borders is now “far right,” and the Democrats can’t do that, can they?
But there’s a real irony here, of Democrats wanting to protect Ukraine’s borders, but not our own.
Republicans hope that Democrats will feel political pressure to accept some of their border proposals after illegal crossings topped a daily average of more than 8,000 earlier this fall. President Joe Biden, who is running for reelection next year, has faced pressure even from fellow Democrats over the migrant flow.
Think about those numbers. “(A) daily average of more than 8,000” “illegal crossings” works out to over 240,000, roughly a quarter of a million illegal immigrants ‘migrants’ in a month, but President Biden, who has the same tools at his disposal that President Trump used to greatly reduce illegal immigration, simply won’t take action. We let in almost the population of St Louis, Missouri, a hellhole of homicide itself, of illegal immigrants in just a month.
We need to do both things: really restrict illegal immigration, and cut off aid for Ukraine, but we might, at best, get one.
