For Presidents' Day, the House will take two weeks off. But first the Republicans who govern the place badly honored their favorite president blocking desperately needed aid to Ukraine, just like Donald Trump demanded.
That loyalty to the former president, and the resulting gift to Ukraine's Russian invaders, was a terrible sight even before Friday's news that Vladimir Putin's brave nemesis, Alexei Navalny, had died in an arctic prison. Navalny joins the long list of Putin's enemies who have died behind bars, fallen from windows or killed by bullets or poison.
Every president since Franklin D. Roosevelt would be dismayed by Republican acquiescence to Russian aggression. Except Trump.
opinion columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical look to the national political scene. He has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
And President Biden has to manage the mess that Trump and his “America First” disciples in Congress are making of America's reliability within the global alliances created after World War II. He is the one who has to reassure NATO allies after Trump falsely and repeatedly — amid disturbing applause at his political rallies — he describes those allies as lazy and invites Russia to attack them.
And Biden is the one who has to burnish America's hard-earned reputation as the leader of the free world by dispatching his vice president and secretary of state. to do it over the weekend when they met with uneasy European officials at the annual Munich Security Conference.
“History is watching,” Biden repeated five times last week in a speech urging the House to follow the bipartisan lead of the Senate, which had just voted 70 to 29 in favor of more aid to Ukraine, along with aid to both Israel and Gaza, as well as Taiwan.
Biden was right to emphasize that phrase: History is looking. Not that MAGA Republicans care.
After all, if Trump and his followers had any sense of history, they would not have revived the mantle of “America First,” associated as it is with the isolationist, pre-World War II American First Committee. That Nazi-friendly organization opposed the United States helping Britain and other allies besieged by Germany after 1939.
However, seven years ago Trump proudly proclaimed in his inaugural speech“From this day on, only America will come first.”
That stale cry remains a prominent theme in Trump's reelection repertoire, because it resonates not only among his MAGA minions but also among other Americans justifiably disillusioned by two decades of costly misadventures and bloodshed in Iraq and Afghanistan and by economic disruption. of globalization.
The slogan is now a central pillar of the Republican Party because, after all, it is Trump's party. And the once Grand Old Party that long defined itself by its opposition to Russia/Soviet Union now plays Putin's scapegoat.
This move away from global leadership and multilateralism – towards isolationism and unilateralism – is dangerously misguided. If the United States steps back, Russia is likely to keep it up. So will China and Iran, two powers that Republicans are quick to condemn. Can't Republicans see that their words and actions embolden our adversaries? America first, in fact.
As Biden said last week, the United States “stands at a turning point in history, where the decisions we make now will determine the course of our future for decades to come.” Deciding whether to help or abandon Ukraine is not as dramatic a turning point as, say, 9/11. However, the answer will be just as momentous.
In the almost 14 crazy months that Republicans have had a majority in the House of Representatives, they have retreated from several impossible positions to avoid a calamity, in those cases a debt crisis and several government shutdowns. (Another shutdown looms three days after the House returns on Feb. 28.)
Still, it's hard to see them backing down this time.
To allow a vote on the Senate foreign aid bill, the president “MAGA Mike” Johnson, from Louisiana, would have to be willing to quit the job he's had for less than four months. Republican extremists have said they would move to get rid of him just as they did his predecessor if the House approves aid to Ukraine. Everyone knows that the bill would pass, by a bipartisan margin, if it came to a vote.
Republicans and Democrats have dismissed calls for a rarely used workaround: A majority of House members could sign a petition demanding a vote, thus forcing a vote. Many Republicans do not want to challenge the leaders of the House of Representatives, nor their top leader, in this way: “Going against Trump right now is a death sentence,” said one of them. saying. And the progressive Democrats will not sign because they oppose aid to Israel, given its horrible attacks on Gaza.
in a second stratagem To try to save aid to Ukraine, a small bipartisan group drafted a scaled-down compromise. This too is likely doomed to failure.
The only answer, it seems, is the least likely: shame Johnson into allowing a vote. Even after Navalny's death, the speaker remained silent on aid to Ukraine, saying only that the United States and its allies should do more to deny Putin access to funds for his war.
Biden has tried to shame: “Are you going to support Ukraine or are you going to support Putin? “Will we be with the United States or… or with Trump?”
I'm afraid we already have the answer from House Republicans.
What's worse, many Republicans would like nothing more than to turn Biden into a liar, who swore Ukraine in its State of the Union address last year: “We will be with you as long as necessary.“
If Republicans end aid to Ukraine, they will be on the wrong side of history. The judgment will not be kind. His Trumpian “America First” speech will receive the same treatment as the original version: near-universal condemnation.
