After Speaker Johnson (R-LA) sent the U.S. House on a two week vacation without passing needed aid to Ukraine, the White House held a call to make the case for how urgent the need is, pointing to the fact that the bill advances America’s core national security interest.
“It’s also in our strategic interests, our cold blooded national security interests to help Ukraine stand up to Putin’s vicious and brutal invasion. We know from history that when dictators aren’t stopped, they keep going. The costs for America rises and the consequences get more and more severe for our NATO allies and elsewhere in the world,” Jake Sullivan, national security adviser to President Biden, said in a call with reporters in which I took part.
“We know that Putin doesn’t just dream of conquering Ukraine is threatened our NATO allies who we are treaty bound to defend.”
It is odd, to say the least, that the Republican-led House is so blase about the threat to the United States, even after the deeply troubling “new intelligence on Russian military capabilities related to its efforts to deploy a nuclear anti-satellite system in space.”
But for those who don’t seem too concerned about the safety of citizens in the United States, there’s also the issue that it is an investment in U.S. defense capacity.
The Ukraine aid bill is also an investment in US Defense as it expands production in the factories, “revitalizing our submarine industrial base and supporting jobs across our country all while improving our own military readiness, thanks to an Enhanced Defense industrial base.”
That is to say that when we send older weapons to Ukraine, we make new weapons to replenish our defense systems, which is obviously a win-win at this point.
Sullivan also noted that the weapons that we’ve been sending to Ukraine “are being made in America by American workers in 14 states across our country.” So, the weapons have been creating jobs, too.
Basically, supplying the weapons Ukraine needs makes America stronger.
Oh, and the bill will also “provide life saving humanitarian assistance for vulnerable people who have been impacted by conflicts around the world.”
The latter is not a Republican value, so it is unlikely to move the Speaker. Johnson was seen most recently with former President Donald Trump, from whom he takes his marching orders on Ukraine and Russia, and the former president has long aligned the Republican Party with Russia over Ukraine and even the United States at times.
To make his point about the urgency of the bill, Sullivan cited Putin’s first notable battlefield victory in a year, after Ukraine forces were forced to withdraw from a town in eastern Ukraine where they’ve been battling Russia for many months, saying, “This happened in large part because Ukraine is running out of weapons due to congressional inaction and Ukrainian troops didn’t have the supplies and ammunition they needed to stop the Russian advance.”
In the question and answer portion of the call, Sullivan laid the recent Ukrainian retreat at the doorstep of Congressional inaction, “They’re not getting them because we have now gone weeks and months without the necessary funding. And that’s been a result of congressional inaction.”
“We are asking Congress to urgently pass the National Security supplemental bill and provide vital support to Ukraine so that it can continue to defend itself from Putin’s vicious onslaught,” Sullivan said.
The question that should be asked of Speaker Johnson and other House Republicans is why they are prioritizing Donald Trump’s whims over U.S. national security, and fear of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is not a good enough answer.
