Biden is Holding Ukraine Aid Hostage to Protect an Open Border
The Great Healer of “Our Democracy” Has a Real Desire to Throw Ukrainian and Israeli Democracy Under the Bus
“The irresponsibility of this! It is unfathomable. Should Ukrainian women and children tell Russia to stop bombing while Congress devises a security border plan? This is reprehensible. It is dangerous. The enemies of civilization are watching this and chuckling. China is watching. Iran is watching. And the ignominy does not obtain to the GOP alone. Why won’t the Democrats give the GOP what they want? They want to restart construction on the wall? Fine. They want to make it vastly harder for migrants to claim asylum? Fine. Neither of these ideas will work, but let them figure that out and let them own the failure. Just get the aid for Ukraine.
Ensuring that Putin doesn’t conquer Europe is a thousand times more urgent than anything else these idiots have been sent to Congress to do. There’s a war in the heart of Europe—and it’s spreading to the American hemisphere. Small wonder Maduro feels emboldened to invade Guyana.
How can they be so blind, so feckless, so immoral, and so incompetent? What happened to the country I grew up in? It is astonishing to watch a great, historic world power—and my own country—self-destruct this way. And it is agonizing.” — Claire Berlinski ~ The Cosmopolitan Globalist, Substack
For months, much of the House’s dysfunction has revolved around the issue of the Republicans’ inability to nominate a speaker; the sensational intrigue regarding the personality, character, and demeanor of the speaker (which is entirely trivial and irrelevant when you consider that regardless of who it is, he would be in the same position McCarthy before him was in, beholden to performers, who at any time could hold a vote to oust him); and thirdly whether Republicans led by Matt Gaetz will force a government shutdown or finally cut Ukraine loose. But increasingly the significance of the House GOP melodrama lately (and it is very pathetic) lies in what it obscures: that is the demagogue’s unwillingness to compromise on funding border security to aid Ukraine.
Depending on your point of view, either you think it’s reprehensible that Republicans would even think to use Ukraine’s sovereignty as a bargaining chip to leverage concessions on something as frivolous as the Southern border. Or, you think that the border is so important that, indeed, perhaps it’s worth jamming an ally and invaluable strategic asset if it means forcing the president to act, never mind what it shows our enemies about our priorities (on Russian state television recently they praised congressional Republicans).
For a long time, my view was more or less the former. But Biden’s inflexibility—that recalls the absurd spectacle where he demanded a clean debt ceiling raise without any spending negotiations—has inclined me to reconsider it. If you can forget for a second about the GOP’s derangement and the unsavoriness of figures like Matt Gaetz, then it becomes clear that Biden is the true villain failing Ukraine. Observing that Republicans are not actually refusing to aid Ukraine, not as long as Biden throws in some billion for the border, what is conspicuous is why Biden doesn’t make a deal, and he insists on blasting the other side.
A substantial number of Republicans, despite even Trump’s opinion, don’t want to cut aid to Ukraine. They passed aid already multiple times. However, they are also obligated to their constituents, who are not unreasonably alarmed by the millions of illegal migrants who have been allowed into the country on Biden’s watch, at Biden’s largesse. In fact I would argue, the amount of migrants is so obscene, and Ukraine is so vital, it’s astonishing if Biden can’t see reason here, and if he thinks he can leverage no less than the very future of Ukraine’s existence to capitalize on an opportunity to make the GOP look bad. But I suspect tragically these are some of the incentives behind his stonewalling.
Kim Strassel persuasively argues in her recent Wall Street Journal column, “Democrats’ Border Unreality,” Biden is beholden to the open border comrades in the Democratic party,
The White House’s problem—and by extension Mr. Schumer’s—is the Democratic left. Policies that slow the border flow would help Mr. Biden and vulnerable Senate Democrats up for re-election. The president is facing crises abroad and home, his poll numbers are dismal; signing a Ukraine and Israel aid bill would count as a real political win.
But progressive lawmakers and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus are furious, decrying any changes to the status quo as unacceptable. The left might be able to swallow a change to the asylum standard, but they are refusing to budge on the parole issue—since that is Mr. Biden’s tool to allow into the country sweeping categories of noncitizens who otherwise lack a legal basis for admission. Lawmakers on the left also want to keep the asylum and parole issues as bargaining chips for a future debate over paths to citizenship.
Joe Biden remains terrified of his party’s left, which is why instead of coming to an agreement with the GOP—something that could have happened weeks ago—the White House has been running every play in the book. It tried the anger approach—berating Republicans as unreasonable and arguing the border is unrelated to national security. It tried fear-mongering. Mr. Biden warned this week that failure to pass the package immediately will lead to a Russian incursion into NATO lands and U.S. boots on the ground. It tried the straw-man ruse, suggesting there was no time to negotiate comprehensive immigration reform—when nobody was thinking that big in the first place.
But there’s a more unsavory reason for Biden’s obtuseness that critics who are prone to mistaking Biden’s age or his policies for naiivete, and critically underestimate his opportunism and the fact that he is fundamentally a bad man, tend to miss. For failing to aid Ukraine would accelerate Biden’s plans for forcing Ukraine to negotiate with Putin before the next election, and it would perfectly suit his agenda to pin the blame for Ukraine’s forced surrender on the classic Democratic myth of Republican obstructionism.
As Garry Kasparov put it in his contributing op-ed to the Journal yesterday, “Victory Seems Not to be an Option for Biden,”
It’s convenient for Mr. Biden that MAGA Republicans oppose aid to Ukraine; he can blame them for his failure to deliver. While it’s true that Congress is playing politics with American credibility and Ukrainian lives, so is Mr. Biden, who has the power to arm Ukraine today if he wished. The tanks, ATACMS, big drones and jets that Ukraine needs to win the war are collecting dust in American warehouses instead of destroying the Russian military.
When we consider how Biden has deliberately under-supplied Ukraine—each time only assenting to arms deliveries after equivocations— and deliberately sought to undermine their counteroffensive, it is salutary for our purposes to remember Biden cares no more for a Ukrainian victory than certain anti-Ukraine Republicans.
Despite his tough talk about “democracy” and “international rules,” as a known consequence of Biden’s habit of grandstanding to substitute for a lack of policy and his irrepressible need to garner acclaim to nourish a heroic fantasy about himself wherever he can, all Biden’s support for Ukraine boils down to a talking point. The fact of which I would argue even makes it small wonder how Republicans might suspect Ukraine’s cause is only a Democratic partisan sort of ruse.
I don’t think yet another demagogic gamble on aggressive partisanship is going to work for Biden, similar to the spectacle with the debt ceiling where eventually he was forced to compromise. Biden is an asshole, but he is not altogether stupid, and he might have a grandiose view of what the executive is entitled to demand, besides a belief in the vaulting power of the central government, but he knows how politics works from experience. And I expect when he senses there would be more to lose by letting Ukraine aid sink on his watch, he will compromise with Republicans for posting up more money for the border.
This is not to say that Republicans here are innocent. They’re not. The point is neither party is. The Democrats are right in my opinion that Ukraine’s survival is more important than the migrant crisis, however the Republicans definitely have a point that the border situation is a catastrophe. And we do need border security now (until we can reform the asylum process and work with Central and South American countries to control the surge, we should be deporting people rather than catching them, giving them a court date, and then releasing them).
I only wish both parties weren’t so depraved that partisan bickering over the border would have each using Ukraine as a pawn for political purposes. In a sense I actually think this is evil. If a free people fighting for their lives, who are being brutalized by Putin, and the only thing standing between their survival and their annihilation is your weapons and support, strikes you as an electoral opportunity to be exploited, there is something horribly wrong with you.
I just think that Biden is more to blame than Republicans, and he deserves the brunt of the criticism. It’s his presidential duty to compromise on border reform to fund Ukraine. He owes that to the 70% of the country who are worried about the border that it is entirely his responsibility for mismanaging. He owes it to Republicans who have agreed to fund Ukraine every time until now. And he owes it to the Ukrainians who have been hurt badly enough by his choice to make them wage a counteroffensive without air support, or advanced mine-clearing technology or long range ATACM’s to strike deep inside Russian territory.
When you put it into perspective, it’s perverse that Biden is choosing to blame the GOP for all the problems he created. Only pride and craven incentives explain his refusal to compromise. If he were a decent man, he would be making a deal with Republicans in apology and out of shame.
— Jay
Pretty harsh. But I agree he really needs to make a deal. I don’t even think there’s real political upside to what he’s doing. The border is a massive political vulnerability for Democrats. Now is a great time to throw the open-boarders part of the party under the buss.