Despite a long filibuster by Republican Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY), Mike Lee (R-UT), J.D. Vance (R-OH), and others, the Senate passed a $95 billion foreign aid bill early Tuesday morning. Over $60 billion in aid would go to Ukraine, with the rest split between Taiwan and both sides of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Not that a nation $34 trillion in debt and running a $1.6 trillion deficit should be passing massive spending bills, regardless of their contents, but it should be noted that this bill does not include any border control measures pushed by Republicans.
Spending by both parties has been out of control for so long that “$95 billion in foreign aid” doesn’t make the average American blink, but we should look at this bill in comparison with our own defense spending. The annual budget of the U.S. Marine Corps is $52.3 billion. In fact, you can take the USMC budget along with the U.S. Coast Guard ($13.45 billion) and the combined budget of U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement ($25 billion) and still come well short of what 70 senators, including 22 Republicans, have decided to send overseas.
If the Senate’s goal of sending another $60 billion to Ukraine eventually becomes reality, aid to the war-torn Eastern European nation will total over $173 billion, slightly less than the annual budget of the U.S. Navy. Russia spends an estimated 4.7 trillion rubles, roughly $84 billion, annually on its military. A majority of Americans rightly view the Ukraine war as a stalemate, with only 19% of voters polled viewing Ukraine as winning the war. Who knew that deficit spending and Wilsonian interventionism doesn’t produce the desired results?
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For his part, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) scoffed at the Senate’s stand-alone foreign aid bill, saying in a statement, “The mandate of national security supplemental legislation was to secure America’s own border before sending additional foreign aid around the world. It is what the American people demand and deserve. Now, in the absence of having received any single border policy change from the Senate, the House will have to continue to work its own will on these important matters.” Admirable, but the speaker is working with a razor-thin (and shrinking) majority.
Perhaps Johnson will be able to squeeze some border control measures out of his Democratic colleagues who seem as committed to open borders as they are to limitless spending. But the likeliest outcome is that both houses of Congress will eventually vote to keep the cash pipeline from the American taxpayer to foreign governments and the American military-industrial complex flowing unabated. Meanwhile, the U.S. dollar continues its descent into irrelevance, and the Ukraine war drags on toward its eventual and predictable end, which sees Russia maintain control of Crimea and the Donbas region.
Brady Leonard (@bradyleonard) is a musician, political strategist, and host of The No Gimmicks Podcast.