Fiddling While Ukraine Burns

Inaction is the New Normal

Shawn Thew, Getty Images

Despite growing hopes that the House could finally pass Ukraine aid when they return from their break in April, I think people are being overly sanguine about the actual political incentives at play. Despite direct appeals from Zelensky for the House to act, I doubt anything is going to change.

While there are more than enough votes to pass a Ukraine aid package—that has been the case since February 24th, 2022. There has always been an overwhelming number of members of the House that would vote to send assistance to Ukraine if there was a straight-up vote on aid.

The problem is that the GOP political incentives to do nothing, or move as slowly as possible, are even more potent now than 6 months ago.

For starters, now that Trump is the presumptive nominee, he has once again firmly positioned himself as the primary political power broker of the GOP. Even though he was always going to be the nominee, the illusion that Nikki Haley had a future gave members of the House the top cover to break from him on a vote.

While there is of course nothing preventing GOP members from growing a spine and breaking with Trump to do something that’s morally upstanding, I think we all have enough evidence from the last 8 years that I can safely say it’s unlikely. There’s hardly anyone left in the GOP House that’s willing to get primaried over a Ukraine aid vote.

This means that if Trump wants to obstruct a vote, he probably can, and he has already opposed past aid packages.

On top of this, every week that we delay a vote, the closer we are to the 2024 election. The political incentive to frustrate the administration’s foreign policy priorities to improve Trump’s electoral odds only grows more acute the longer this drags on. It’s one thing to help out the opposition two years before a general election, it’s a different thing to do it 6 months before the election.

In contrast, the GOP can easily continue to use the House in ways that will help their electoral chances—namely their elaborate political theatre masquerading as impeachment hearings. It is essentially cost-free in terms of political capital—it makes Trump and the base ecstatic—and means you can appear to be doing something without putting your name on legislation.

It’s much more appealing to be able to get your two minutes on Fox News for shouting at whichever poor soul has been dragged before the Judicial Committee on any given day than it is to break with your leadership on a meaningful vote.

Nobody wants to be the guy who bites the bullet when there’s a daily layup you could be making. Even if that means you’ve spent an entire year doing nothing.

The next problem is that Marjorie Taylor Greene has already filed a motion to vacate, and she’d likely go forward in an attempt to remove Speaker Johnson if he moves forward with a vote on Ukraine aid.

Speaker Johnson has even less leverage in this scenario than Kevin McCarthy did thanks to the GOP’s tenuous hold on the House growing even more slim thanks to GOP members retiring. A new fight over a Speaker would probably drag an already sclerotic Congress to a total halt, and be an embarrassment for a party competing in an upcoming election.

If this scenario came up the Democrats could potentially save Mike Johnson by abstaining, and it would probably be reasonable if only for the sake of actually attempting to accomplish something in 2024.

The Democrats have already had to save the GOP Congress from multiple shutdowns at this point, so it’s possible, but would probably require actual compromise from Speaker Johnson I doubt he’s willing to accommodate.

That being said, the Democrats have little incentive to do so when Speaker Johnson hasn’t exactly been conciliatory with his continued backing of the GOP’s various House investigations. Not to mention that the Democratic Party also has little reason to bail out their competition right before an election.

This is all without the obvious point that needing the Democrats to save your Speakership is effectively career suicide in the context of the GOP’s political dynamic. Good luck explaining to the Sean Hannity audience why Hakeem Jeffries is the reason you’re the Speaker.

What I’m saying here is that Mike Johnson is probably not going to go forward with a vote in the near term that would trigger a struggle for the Speakership unless he’s willing to fall on his sword to get the aid on the floor. I haven’t gotten the sense thus far that he’s particularly keen on doing that.

There’s always the route of a discharge petition to get aid to the floor, but there’s quite a lot of partisan disincentives to doing that which historically makes discharge petitions extraordinarily rare. To put the problem in simple terms, your party’s whip would beat you to death in the hallway for going against your party’s leader—especially in something this high profile.

The next problem is that after months of inaction, there has been a very real effect on the battlefield for Ukraine. The lack of munitions and equipment has led to the Russian military being able to sustain a slow and grinding offensive across the front in Eastern Ukraine.

While coming at an extraordinarily high cost in men and manpower, the Russian population and industrial base can probably sustain this level of fighting for years, while Ukraine cannot.

This in turn has caused commentators—many of whom were always opposed to supporting Ukraine in the first place—to begin to point at Ukrainian battlefield reverses as proof that Ukraine’s cause was always doomed to failure. In their telling, any further aid would be a waste of money in the face of Russia’s inevitable victory.

Despite this being bullshit, it has a powerful pull as a piece of rhetoric for the far-right in their attempts to frustrate future aid. The shortage of critical munitions will continue without aid, which will strengthen calls from people arguing that Ukraine is a lost cause, which will in turn serve to delay the aid for sending munitions in a vicious cycle. It’s a self-reinforcing echo chamber that provides a ready-made excuse for inaction.

This isn’t to say that the House might not somehow find a way to get something passed. It’s possible. But if the House is going to get aid through, it’s also probably going to be in a painfully drawn-out and time-consuming circus.

There is a lot of support in the House to provide aid, and there are quite a few members that do understand the urgency with which they have to act. The problem is that doing so means they have to find a way to thread any potential aid package through an increasingly narrow window and eat the resulting political fallout from any package.

Nobody is going to come back from the House recess sprinting to the floor with a bill. After all, it’s been a lot easier to grandstand in an impeachment hearing that’s going nowhere than to risk incurring an actual political cost for doing something.