“The delay by the US Congress in approving a vital aid bill means Ukraine is now struggling to fight back Russian advances, a former US military official said.
In an interview with CNN, retired US Air Force Col. and military analyst Cedric Leighton discussed Ukraine’s increasingly desperate attempts to hold back Russian advances near Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second biggest city.
He said that the delay in passing the $61 billion US aid bill, which was approved in April after being blocked for months by Republicans, had placed Ukraine at a disadvantage.
“The delay in aid was, frankly an inexcusable pause in the ability of the Ukrainians to fend off Russian advances. And right now what it means is that the Ukrainians are on the backfoot,” said Leighton.”
“Speaker Mike Johnson will likely escape Marjorie Taylor Greene’s first attempt to fire him. The threat of an ouster vote will still haunt him all year long.
Despite near-universal consensus in the House that allowing any one member to force a snap vote on booting a speaker is a recipe for chaos, lawmakers in both parties are increasingly acknowledging that they have almost no chance of changing that rule before January.
It’s not for a lack of interest — in fact, the idea was brought up in GOP meetings as recently as this week. But Johnson is boxed in from both sides. He can’t change the rules with only Republican votes because of the rebels on his right flank, who insisted that former Speaker Kevin McCarthy empower them by allowing a single lawmaker to force a vote of no confidence.
And Democrats, while they’re ready to save him from Greene’s (R-Ga.) first ejection attempt next week, are clear that their mercy won’t necessarily be permanent if the Georgia firebrand, or someone else, tries again. They also have little political incentive to give Johnson more permanent protection, unless he opens up broader negotiations about potential power sharing in the House. That price is too steep for the speaker to pay.”
“At a press conference, the Kentucky Republican pinpointed two men responsible for that delay: former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson and former President Donald Trump.
“The demonization of Ukraine began by Tucker Carlson, who in my opinion ended up where he should have been all along, which is interviewing Vladimir Putin,” McConnell, R-Ky., told reporters. “And so he had an enormous audience, which convinced a lot of rank and file Republicans that maybe this was a mistake.”
“I think the former president had sort of mixed views on” Ukraine aid, he added, before alluding to the failed attempt to add border security provisions to the bill, “which requires you to deal with Democrats, and then a number of our members thought it wasn’t good enough.”
“And then our nominee for president didn’t seem to want us to do anything at all,” McConnell said. “That took months to work our way through it.”
The top Senate Republican has been an ardent supporter of Ukraine aid and battled a slew of conservative voices who have sought to block it. He called the expected passage of the bill “an important day for America, and a very important day of freedom-loving countries around the world.””
“Over this 25-year stretch, Congress has passed its final annual funding package* an average of 113 days into the corresponding fiscal year, around Jan. 21. And that number is trending upward: Over the last decade, the government operated under stopgap funding measures for an average of 134 days, or into mid-February. We only need to look back two years, to fiscal 2022, to find the last time CRs stretched into March, and back to fiscal 2017 for an even longer impasse, which wasn’t resolved until early May.
This means Congress may spend half of each year struggling to complete its most basic responsibility of funding the government, at the expense of other legislative priorities. And even though passing CRs staves off government shutdowns, operating under short-term funding has costly, wide-ranging impacts on federal operations. Funding uncertainty makes it difficult for agencies to plan and budget effectively, often forcing them to delay major projects — an issue of particular concern when it comes to military readiness.”
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“Strikingly, this year’s funding bill not only passed with fewer Republican than Democratic votes, but also with more than half of the Republican caucus voting against it (breaking the informal “Hastert rule” of House majority leadership). Johnson certainly isn’t the first embattled GOP speaker to struggle with a divided party, but this marks the first time in the 25 years we analyzed that any annual appropriations bill or package has passed without a majority of the majority’s support.”
“Ukraine’s president said that Russia is now firing 10 times more artillery shells than his country is able to, and has 30 times more aircraft, in a worrying sign for Ukraine’s ability to sustain its military efforts.”
“What constitutes an emergency? According to Congress’ new spending package, research equipment and facilities for the National Science Foundation is an emergency. So are the 2024 Democratic National Committee convention and the Republican National Committee convention. So is NASA space exploration.
By classifying all these line items as emergencies, Congress can get hundreds of millions of taxpayer funding for them with reduced oversight.”
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“According to a January report from the Cato Institute, Congress has approved over $12 trillion in spending for emergencies over the past three decades, making up around 1 in 10 federal budget dollars spent—more than both Medicaid and veterans programs combined.”
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“”Congress has complete discretion in designating spending for emergencies because what qualifies as an emergency is subject to interpretation,” Romina Boccia and Dominik Lett wrote in Cato’s report. While the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has laid out several criteria that emergency spending is supposed to meet, Boccia and Lett note that “the current process lacks a mechanism to evaluate whether an emergency provision meets the OMB’s test, which means that anything can count as emergency spending.”
Once spending gets earmarked as an emergency, it isn’t subjected to typical caps on discretionary spending, allowing Congress to rack up costs with little accountability. “Unfortunately, over the course of the last 30-some years, Congress took what was designed to be a ‘break glass in case of emergency’ escape valve, and they’ve turned it into a major source of funding for federal activity,” David Ditch, a senior policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation, tells Reason.”It’s just a way for [Congress] to avoid fiscal consequences. And that’s part of how we got where we are.””
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“Cato’s report highlights some particularly egregious examples of this exact phenomenon, including $600 million earmarked for replacing aircraft used in weather forecasting, $347 million for prison construction and detention costs, and $278 million to speed up the building process for a single research center.
“To me, the original sin in all of this is too many members of Congress don’t care at all about where the money comes from, all they care about is getting as much money out the door that they can take credit for,” says Ditch. “They’re more concerned with their next reelection than they are with the nation’s trajectory 20 and 30 years down the line.””