A few key Republican senators have gone out of their way to say that the majority of their colleagues want to continue to provide aid to Ukraine, and they want it to be attached to the stop-gap spending bill Congress will have to pass by the end of the month to avoid shutting down the government.
Republican Sens. John Cornyn of Texas, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Mitt Romney (of Utah, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina each told Politico that the majority of Republicans support Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s stance that aid must continue, and get passed as part of the continuing resolution funding the government. “Time is of the essence,” Tillis said. “The last thing we want to have happen is not have a steady stream of funding to sustain the effort in Ukraine.”
That goes a long way toward suggesting that the Senate won’t have any problems passing a bill that includes continued funding for government operations, as well as the Biden administration’s request for about $40 billion in supplemental appropriations for Ukraine, disaster relief, and border operations. That doesn’t mean there won’t be some posturing from Republicans trying to force random amendments and complaining about how much money we’re spending, but it appears that deep down they won’t be fighting it. At all.
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When it comes to how that happens over on the House side, considering the big mess Speaker Kevin McCarthy is dealing with over there, they just shrug. “They’re gonna have to figure out the best way to get this stuff across the floor of the House, and then we would have—however they do it—some flexibility when that all comes over here about how to marry it all up,” South Dakota Sen. John Thune said. He’s the No. 2 Senate Republican, which makes him leadership.
That leadership could actually be used to help McCarthy figure out how the hell to get out of the mess he’s created by allowing the Freedom Caucus to run amok in the House. They extremist House faction has vowed to the shut the government down if Ukraine aid is included (and if they can’t impeach President Joe Biden, and probably some other things. They like making threats). So far, it appears that McCarthy is leaning toward stripping aid to Ukraine out and having a separate vote on it. That would create a delay Senate Republicans are implying is unacceptable.
The clear solution, if they’re looking for one, is for those senators to start leaning on the non-extremist Republicans from their home states in the House to step up and stand up to the Freedom Caucus, which consists of a pretty small minority of the whole GOP House conference, after all. The senators would have lots of tools at their disposal. They could threaten or cajole or bribe their House counterparts with promises of campaign help.
Those more mainstream Republicans are surely the key to ending the extremists’ reign of terror in the House. They could exert at least as much pressure on McCarthy, because there are a lot more of them. It’s also in these House members’ best interest. Getting reelected would be easier if the Republicans aren’t responsible for another government shutdown.
That intervention could still happen. There are a whole 12 legislative days left, after all. It’s likely that the Senate is going to use that limited time to the fullest. They can play out the clock and engineer the back-and-forth process, to the point where they present the House with a last-minute bill that contains everything. That would force McCarthy to make the choice between passing it or shutting everything down.
In a way, that would help McCarthy save face. He’d avoid the shutdown and could blame the Senate for how it all went down. It would still probably mean the nihilists could try to oust him, but if he’s got the rest of the House Republicans behind him, it’s much less of a worry. In that scenario, he’d pick up enough Democratic support to ensure he kept his speaker’s gavel. That’s another reason why those mainstream House Republicans need to step up, and why the Senate GOP should probably help them. McCarthy’s a pathetically weak speaker, but he’s better than the alternative: total chaos.
