Senate moves $40B Ukraine security bill forward

In Ukraine’s battle against Russia, the US is poised now (pending Senate voting) to send $40 BILLION dollars to Ukraine for their defense. This is a massive increase in the hundreds of millions of dollars we’ve already sent. It’s also nearly SEVEN TIMES what Ukraine spent on their own national security in 2021 ($5.9 billion). This is coming from the Congress that couldn’t find $6 billion dollars to start the border wall, which at the highest end projections was estimated to cost $20 billion.

Only eleven US Senators are voting against the measure, all Republicans. They are led by Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), who had previously held up the “speedy passage” of the bill by insisting on having an inspector general assigned to monitor the fiscal use of this historically large sum of money. With Ukraine’s history for corruption, that would seem a prudent use of taxpayer resources.

Yahoo! News characterizes it as such;

Eleven Republican senators bucked their leadership and voted against a motion advancing a $40 billion security assistance package for Ukraine on Monday, a sign of growing GOP opposition to U.S. efforts aimed at countering Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bloody three-month-old invasion there.

The security package isn’t expected to pass until later this week because a single Republican senator, Rand Paul of Kentucky, is objecting to a quick vote on the measure.

Paul has demanded the legislation give an inspector general authority to oversee spending, which he called unprecedented and fiscally unsound. But Democrats said that would require a re-vote in the House and burn precious time given Russia’s daily bombing of Ukrainian cities that is causing horrifying scenes of death and devastation.

In his floor speech earlier Monday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) slammed Paul’s efforts to delay passage of the bill as “totally unacceptable,” saying that it “only serves to strengthen Putin’s hand in the long run.”

Ah yes, if you question the gospel of the Church of the Latest Thing™, you are a heretic and a pro-Russian shill to Putin.

I’m all for supporting Ukraine, which I think I’ve made clear. Most here also want to see them prevail against the Russians, but asking for some checks and balances to be in place before we send $40 billion to a country isn’t absurd. It’s absurd that we aren’t putting such checks in place. Republicans know that Biden and his family have had crooked, shady dealings in the country. Democrats were howling for the last two years about how Trump was conducting shady dealings in the country. It would seem there should be bi-partisan support in favor of the notion that Ukraine has issues with corruption. That runs afoul of the teachings of the Church of the Latest Thing™.

In three years when Peter Schweizer’s latest book details how our political class and their families profited massively off this aid package, I for one, will not be surprised.

Category: "Your Tax Dollars At Work", Foreign Policy, Ukraine