Congress Does Right The Thing After Exhausting All Other Options
Ukraine aid bill passes by the same margin it would have in September
The US House has passed the $61 billion Ukraine aid bill. Ambassador Michael McFaul notes that the needle barely budged from the last time the House held a vote on Ukraine aid eight months ago.
Winston Churchill never actually said that famous line about Americans exhausting all other options before we do the right thing. People are probably misremembering and misquoting Israeli diplomat Abba Eban. Nevertheless, Americans do have a deep-seated need to procrastinate every time war approaches.
Contrary to what the hippies would have you believe, foreign adventures are not really in America’s DNA and have never sat well on us. The call of duty has always been strong with us, however, and now the House has finally done its duty.
The cost of this legislation is about the same as three years’ worth of troop air conditioning in Afghanistan. Eighty percent of the spending will improve American arsenals and our defense industrial base. Even Mike Johnson figured it out eventually: we either spend this much helping ourselves to help Ukraine, or else we will spend American blood, and trillions of dollars, to cope with the results of cowardly appeasement. Now it is up to Joe Biden to show that he gets it, too.