OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
A leading Republican senator is blowing the whistle on the party’s Senate leader, Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), over the chamber’s latest foreign aid funding bill, which would send tens of billions more in U.S. tax dollars to Ukraine.
In a Twitter Spaces session, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said that McConnell and more than a dozen other Republican senators voted to pass a $95 billion “foreign aid” package that would send $60.1 billion to Ukraine at a time when, according to national polling, a growing majority of Americans have said they oppose sending more tax dollars to the war-torn country, especially while domestic problems including a chaotic southwestern border continue to fester.
“When we entered this thing, McConnell said his top priority was funding for Ukraine. But public opinion and the very strong political rhetoric that we ought to secure our own border before we spend $60 billion to secure Ukraine’s was effective. And so McConnell finally switched and said, ‘OK, we’ve got to let Democrats know that we are serious. We are going to defeat closure on this bill, and we are going to demand that border security is going to be attached to funding for Ukraine,’” Johnson explained.
“Then secret negotiations occurred on an issue the public supports Republicans on, and we end up with this monstrosity of a bill. It is an immigration bill. It’s not a border security bill. But during that time frame, we repeatedly talked about making Ukraine funding contingent on border metrics,” he added.
“We had it all laid out. We had a proposal. We had a great deal of support in our conference, but what [Sen.] Mike [Lee] (R-Utah) pointed out is unbeknownst to us at the time, McConnell told [Sen. James] Lankford (R-Okla.) that that’s not even on the table,” the Wisconsin Republican continued.
“He, on his own … using his own authority without telling the conference even though he knew that the conference supported tying border security or Ukraine funding to actually securing the border, McConnell just took that off the table,” he said.
“And that moment of leverage we had where we could use Biden’s desire for Ukraine funding to actually force him to use his executive authority to secure the border has been lost, and that is why so many of us are speaking out against McConnell. It was such a breach of his leadership position and such a, just a horrible thing to do to Americans who want a secure border,” Johnson added.
LISTEN:
Sen. Ron Johnson explains how GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell tried to betray America and Americans with a fake 'border security' bill that was always designed to fund Ukraine first.
McConnell and his ilk need to GO. pic.twitter.com/DoD9VDmYpV
— USA Features Media (@UsaFeatures) February 15, 2024
In the wake of the failed ‘border security’ bill — which Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) had already declared “dead on arrival” in the House — a growing number of GOP senators are calling on ousting McConnell as the party’s Senate leader.
Sen. Ted Cruz, for instance, did not mince words late last week after the chamber failed to advance a “bipartisan” piece of legislation that was advertised as a border security bill but which actually sent billions more dollars to Ukraine, Israel, and other countries.
The Texas Republican made it clear he believes it is time for McConnell to step down from the party’s leadership and quite possibly even leave the chamber altogether.
“Mitch McConnell, in effect, gave the largest in-kind campaign contribution to the Democrats’ Senate campaign committee in history,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told The Daily Caller.
“Every single Democrat candidate in the country running for Senate, running for House will use the identical talking points — they will all say: We wanted to secure the border. We tried to secure the border, but the Republicans wouldn’t let us,” Cruz said. “Now, that is a wild-eyed lie. It is completely false. This bill would have made the border crisis worse.”
“I think this is our opportunity to take him out, and we’re sort of working to figure out if that’s possible,” according to one Republican senator, granted anonymity by The Daily Caller.
“As long as I’ve been serving in the Senate, there’s never been an issue where the American public is so overwhelmingly in support of our position, which is to secure the border.
“So how can you take — as leader — how do you take an issue where the American people support us and lead us into a box, where now, when a bill is produced, it is worse than doing nothing,” Johnson told the outlet. “When that’s rejected, we get blamed. I mean, you got to work overtime to screw that up.”
