House GOP set to borrow and spend $61 billion for Captain Undershirt and prolong Ukraine crusade
An optimistic cynic might say that at least Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) is the most conservative Democrat Speaker of the House since Sam Rayburn (D-Texas) held the job on and off in the 1940s and 50s.
On Friday, Speaker Johnson used more Democrat votes than Republican ones to get foreign aid for Ukraine, Israel, and sort of Taiwan through the House Rules Committee and set for likely passage this weekend. The only bone thrown to Republican opponents of the additional deficit spending is a bill to Americanize or ban TikTok, the app that currently enables a Chinese-controlled corporation to track the movements of Americans and manipulate the information they receive. Johnson has constructed the four components to receive individual votes in the House but pass to the Senate as a single package, thus preventing that body from picking and choosing what to send to President Joe Biden for his signature.
The amounts are staggering. In the 1980s, there was an ugly, long-running food fight in Washington over aid to the anti-communist Contras in Nicaragua. (American Dad did an explainer.) The high-water mark for that aid was $100 million in 1986. Adjusting for inflation, that amount would be $285 million today. Congress is set to appropriate $61 billion for Ukraine, on top of at least $113 billion that Congress has already blown on the corrupt, authoritarian, non-ally, irrelevance to definable U.S. national interests that is slowly losing a war of attrition with Russia. To put this further in perspective, much-criticized U.S. aid to Israel totaled an inflation-adjusted $300 billion over nearly eight decades from 1946-2023.
The rest of the $95 billion the House will borrow and spend includes $26.4 billion ostensibly for Israel, but some of which will go to rebuild areas currently or formerly run by Hamas. Then there is also what is touted as $8.1 billion for “Taiwan,” but which only provides for $2 billion in what is known as “foreign military financing”—handouts to buy U.S. weapons—for “assistance to the Indo-Pacific region and for related expenses.” Who knows if Taiwan’s military will actually see a dime given the deep state’s expertise at tripping up anything that is helpful to Taiwan and harmful to China. (The additional oddity of this spending is that Taiwan has historically paid for its own weapons and is being pushed onto the dole by Washington—losing a key selling point to an American public skeptical of additional foreign obligations.
