Republican Bloc Says It Is For Freedom
But They Take Dictator Putin's Side on US Aid to Help Ukraine Defeat Him
Last Friday (2/24/23) marked the one year anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s deadly and unprovoked military invasion of Ukraine. Two things are now clear:
Russia is not the great military war machine it claimed to be. Putin thought his war in Ukraine was going to be a proverbial 15 minute war. Go in. Win easy. Come home. Let the parades begin.
It didn’t work out that way.
Significant and growing portions of the Republican Party are choosing to stand with the dictator Putin, rather than with the people of Ukraine who are fighting to preserve and protect freedom in their country. That group of Republicans are increasingly vocal about their opposition to US aid to Ukraine, and are gaining ground in the party.
That is a very strange place to be for members of a political party that markets itself (falsely) as the party that always stands for freedom.
The good news is that the battle to supply Ukraine with the urgent help it needs is still one that President Biden is winning. Democratic leaders and Democratic members of the House and Senate support continuing aid. They support helping Ukraine remain free and independent.
Republican leaders in the House and Senate, and most Republican members of the House and Senate - including Iowa’s all Republican congressional delegation - also support continued aid to Ukraine, which has totaled $113 billion so far from the US alone. They, too, support helping Ukraine remain free from the dictator’s boot heel.
Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is the most wobbly of the Republican leaders, but that is to be expected. What McCarthy says one day is always subject to change the next.
What is most puzzling, however is how a political party that has its very own, self proclaimed, “Freedom Caucus” in the House can also have so many in its ranks - also in the House - who are so terribly on the wrong side of “freedom” when it comes to helping Ukraine preserve its freedom.
Those Republicans - let’s call them the “Anti-Freedom Caucus” since Republicans like so much to splash catchy names on everything - are pretty much who you’d expect them to be: the same group of extremists to whom McCarthy turned over the keys to the House in order to buy the votes he needed to claim the Speakership.
One of them, Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz, introduced a congressional resolution earlier this month to end US military and financial aid to Ukraine. The resolution, introduced with 10 co-sponsors, complains of “fatigue” in sending aid to Ukraine.
I might suggest that if Gaetz and his crew wants to experience real fatigue re: the war in Ukraine, they should have spent the last year there dodging real bullets and missiles on a daily basis, never certain if urgently needed help was coming until it got there - or if they would live to see another sunrise until they saw it.
Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia is another. She also argues that the federal debt ceiling should not be raised and the government should default on its debts unless deep spending cuts are made. When asked what cuts she wants made, aid to Ukraine is the first on her list. She says it’s “wasteful spending” and all it does is “prop up” the Ukraine government.
I’m sure Putin adores those efforts.
Gaetz and Greene are not alone. They are not two lonely, looney voices whining in the wilderness.
Fully 57 House Republicans voted against the aid package for Ukraine last May. Every vote cast against that package was cast by a Republican. Their public argument is that America simply can’t afford such an impact on the federal budget. Which came as a quite a suprise to those who watched many of them over the years vote for trillion dollar tax cuts for millionaires, billionaires, and giant corporations without flinching or even batting an eye.
Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, the Republican Party’s leading “Trump without the baggage” contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, is climbing aboard the “trash aid to Ukraine” wagon. He complained in a recent Fox “News” interview that aid to Ukraine is little more than “an open-ended blank check.”
Worst of all, Republican voters are also getting fuzzy on the issue. A recent Fox “News” poll found Republican support for military aid to Ukraine at just 50%.
Not exactly a ringing endorsement for defending freedom.
In his Inaugural Address delivered on January 20, 1961, President John F. Kennedy declared that the United States would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
There is a significant and growing bloc in the Republican Party that believes just the opposite.
Defend liberty and freedom? Not when there are tax cuts for billionaires and giant corporations at stake, anyway. And increasingly - suspiciously, for some Republicans - not when Vladimir Putin is who freedom and liberty need to be defended from.
They need to stop marketing themselves as protectors of freedom, because they are not.
The question of continued military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine makes clear who is willing to defend and protect freedom and who is not. This small, but significant and growing, bloc of Republicans are not on the list of those willing to do so.
Keep an eye on them, and those who might yet join their ranks. This is a defining moment. They are not freedom’s friends.
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