Putin and the Republicans: Brothers in Arms
The puerile politics of the Republican radical right doesn’t stop at water’s edge. With aid to Ukraine in trouble, Putin is counting on it.
With high compliments to Andrew Dyson, the Melbourne Age
In politics, Napoleon noted two centuries ago, stupidity is not a handicap. The Emperor of the French had a point. But as the Republican right wingers who unseated their very own House Speaker made clear last week, its consequences can be. With allies and adversaries watching, US assistance to Ukraine’s offensive against its Russian invaders hangs in the balance while the GOP’s internal intifada paralyzes policymaking at home and abroad.
Kevin McCarthy, the third GOP House leader forced to say goodbye or given the boot by the Republican far right in the last decade, is neither a loss nor the issue. McCarthy groveled before his party’s extremists through 15 votes to get the job, including handing them the hatchet that axed him. As the novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard, Norway’s iconoclast laureate, once wrote, what’s dung can’t be undung. Harassed for his ten months in office by the same wingnuts who gave him the heave-ho, his feckless tenure speaks for itself.
Whoever the GOP’s spitting and hissing produces to fill McCarthy’s chair also is beside the point. What’s important is how the world sees the Republican debacle. Indeed, Le Monde, one of France’s leading newspapers, spotlighted that issue even before the Speaker’s seat was cold. “Can the world still rely on the United States? The field of ruins that the House of Representatives has become can only worry America's allies and delight its adversaries. These adversaries can count on the continuing blindness of Republicans who claim to be patriots.”
The Le Monde editorialist got it right: on Ukraine the few Republicans who can lay claim to a spine are facing a losing fight against the GOP’s politically invertebrate majority. Take the extremists’ non sequitur-cum-battle cry. "We need to make sure that not $1.00 is going to Ukraine,” said Representative Chip Roy, “unless we do our job to secure the border first.” As campaign 2024 unfolds the Texas tough guy’s threat to ignore Ukraine and Europe’s dangers is resonating, not only with his elected Republican bros, but also the GOP’s voting faithful.
Roy’s ridiculous rhetoric itself isn’t news; neither is his party’s trajectory. Last month 117 of the 221 House Republicans voted against funding a $300 million military training program for Ukrainian forces. In July half of the GOP House members also pushed failed votes to curb help for Ukraine in the annual defense spending bill. Their growing numbers tell the story. Up from a quarter of House Republicans in 2022 to a current near majority in the party’s contingent, the ranks of the GOP’s erstwhile flag wavers who want to walk away from aiding Ukraine as well as our European allies are swelling.
In today’s politics where partisan true believers are rarely, if ever exposed to serious debate, the Republicans are pandering to the very public opinion their rhetorical shlock helped create. To be sure, support for Ukraine is falling in both parties; the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll of 1005 Americans showed only 43 percent backed sending arms. But support is far lower among Republicans. According to the Reuters/Ipsos survey, 35 percent back arming Ukraine compared to 52 percent of the Democrats polled.
The consequences of the House Republicans’ anarchistic antics worry more than French editorial writers. Meeting in Spain this week, European Union leaders highlighted a €50 billion aid package for Ukraine now working its way through the EU’s processes, although not without problems. Deferential to Moscow and diffident about Kyiv’s plight, President Viktor Orban of Hungary is tussling with Brussels over his anti-democratic transgressions and could slow or block the assistance. In Spain EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen didn’t mince words, emphasizing the Europeans can’t fill the gap if Washington turns its back on Ukraine.
The Europeans’ anxiety about the consequences of continuing congressional chaos is well founded. Opposition to aid for Ukraine is certain to remain a GOP priority. Working the House floor last week, Rep. Matt Gaetz, who led the menagerie that canned McCarthy, decried his alleged “secret side deal” with President Biden to fund Ukraine. Arizona’s Andy Biggs, Gaetz’s far-right, Freedom Caucus homie and an aid opponent, tweeted “not a penny more” for Ukraine. Even McCarthy’s erstwhile supporters promise trouble. Georgia’s Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, for one, says she won’t vote for any candidate to replace him who favors aid.
Many House Republicans aren’t hiding their contempt for their extremists over the leadership debacle, or for their no-compromise demands that supposedly deep-sixed McCarthy. How much that ire will matter when it comes to policy issues, however, remains to be seen. The Heritage Foundation, the conservatives’ go-to Washington think tank, is hard at work trying to coat the GOP far right’s ranting with a pseudo-intellectual veneer.
“We have to take care of our interests at home before spending any more money on Ukraine,” Heritage President Kevin Roberts recently told a Wall Street Journal editorial board member. Apparently oblivious to Russia’s war footing, Vladimir Putin’s murderous actions and his grander, oft-stated imperial ambitions, Roberts channeled Mary Poppins. Heritage’s brain trust believes, he said, peace “needs to happen immediately.”
The influential think tank’s kumbaya conservatism has its historical echoes. “We sympathize with the oppressed and persecuted everywhere. We also realize that we have great problems at home…and unless and until this situation is corrected our democracy is in danger…. (W)e should settle our own problems before we undertake to settle the problems of Asia, Africa, Australasia, South America, and Europe. As Americans, interested first in America, what is our present stake?”
That was Democratic Senator Burton K. Wheeler, the point man for the original “America First” movement, speaking on the radio on December 30, 1940. Wheeler did his best to hamstring President Franklin Roosevelt’s effort to aid Great Britain as Hitler tightened his grip on Europe. The “America First” movement, of course, disappeared eleven months later with Pearl Harbor, along with the isolationist nonsense that underpinned Wheeler’s views.
Born in Butte, the Montana senator was buried in Washington, DC. So was his profoundly wrong perspective, although it appears the Republicans are doing their best to exhume it. It’s another reason the Europeans are worried. Eighty years ago, or not, America’s allies remember the consequences all too well.
Once again, a well-cast commentary, Kent. The number of purported leaders on the Right who have no concept of international consequences is astounding to me, especially among those who used to be in the more or less moderate majority. Perhaps McCarthy is on to something with his latest offer of willingness to serve once again.
After initially declaring himself done, MacCarthy seems OK with going where no Speaker has gone before--back to the Speaker's Chair after being booted out. In the face of the clueless clambering from the Far Right, the idea of a renewed McCarthy Speakership seems somewhere between simply a deliberate poke at the rebels and a real possibility if moderates were to realize the error of their vote. It will be interesting to see if anyone actually responds to his "How do you like me now?" approach to ending the chaos....