Ukraine Funding at Impasse over Immigration

From the The Morning Dispatch on The Dispatch

Happy Wednesday! If you’re running for president and asked whether you’ve ever been on Jeffrey Epstein’s jet, the best answer you can give is “no, of course not.” The second-best answer you can give is “I was on Jeffrey Epstein’s jet one time.” The third-best answer you can give—the one Robert F. Kennedy gave Fox News’ Jesse Watters last night—is “I was on Jeffrey Epstein’s jet two times.”

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• Israeli government spokesman Eylon Levy said Tuesday Israel would consider another “temporary pause” in its war against Hamas in exchange for the release of more of the 137 remaining hostages taken by the terrorist organization. At a fundraiser yesterday, President Joe Biden blamed Hamas’ refusal to release its remaining female hostages for the breakdown of ceasefire negotiations, and condemned the “unimaginable cruelty” of the terrorist organization for using rape and torture as an instrument of their October 7 attack. Meanwhile, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) on Tuesday pushed further into Khan Younis, the largest city in southern Gaza, where Hamas leadership is believed to be hiding. Yaron Finkelman, commander of the Israeli military’s Southern Command, described Tuesday as “the most intense day since the beginning of the ground operation, in terms of terrorists killed, the number of firefights, and the use of firepower from the land and air.”

• Job openings fell to 8.73 million in October, the Labor Department reported Tuesday, marking a 6.6 percent decline since September and indicating that the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes are cooling the labor market. The numbers represent the lowest mark in nearly two-and-a-half years, and brought the ratio of open jobs to available workers to 1.3 to 1. The hires rate ticked down from 3.8 percent in September to 3.7 percent in October, while the quits rate—a sign of workers’ confidence in their ability to find new employment—remained at 2.3 percent.

• The House Ways and Means Committee released a report on Tuesday purporting to show that then-Vice President Biden used email aliases and private email addresses to communicate with one of his son Hunter’s business associates hundreds of times. IRS whistleblowers provided the committee with the relevant metadata showing 327 separate instances of communication between 2010 and 2019, with the majority occurring during Biden’s time as vice president. A search warrant is required to access the content of the exchanged emails.

• Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama announced on Tuesday that he would end his blanket hold on military promotions—a one-man boycott originally launched to protest the Biden administration’s military abortion policy. The hold applied to hundreds of pending promotions, and had recently come under fire from several of Tuberville’s GOP colleagues. The Senate unanimously approved more than 400 military promotions just hours after Tuberville lifted the block.

• House Financial Services Chairman Patrick McHenry, who served as speaker pro tempore after Kevin McCarthy’s ouster earlier this year, announced on Tuesday his intention to retire from Congress at the end of his current term. “Through good and bad, during the highest of days and the lowest, and from proud to infamous times, the House is the venue for our nation’s disagreements bound up in our hopes for a better tomorrow,” the North Carolina Republican wrote in a statement. “There has been a great deal of handwringing and ink spilled about the future of this institution because some—like me—have decided to leave. Those concerns are exaggerated. … There are many smart and capable members who remain, and others are on their way. I’m confident the House is in good hands.”

Running Out of Money and Time

While the statement, “There is no magical pot of funding available to meet this moment,” may technically be true for any number of issues facing lawmakers on Capitol Hill today, White House budget director Shalanda Young was referring specifically to U.S. funding for Ukraine in a letter to Congressional leaders earlier this week. Previously appropriated aid to the embattled country, she said, will be gone by the end of the year. “We are out of money—and nearly out of time.”

Despite the dire warnings of dwindling days and missing money pots, Congress doesn’t seem to have made much progress on passing additional funding for Ukraine since President Joe Biden first introduced his supplemental funding request in October. Republicans appear to have reached broad agreement—even in a political moment when GOP in-fighting seems to be the norm—on insisting any Ukraine aid be paired with the imposition of stricter border security measures. But making aid to the war-torn nation dependent on both parties finding common ground on perhaps the most intractable legislative problem of the last two decades could augur ill for Ukraine’s effort.

Congress has thus far allocated a total of $111 billion in funding for Ukraine since Russia invaded in February 2022. Still, Young paints a bleak picture: Of the current appropriations, “[The Department of Defense] has used 97 percent of the $62.3 billion it received, and [the Department of State] has used 100 percent of the $4.7 billion in military assistance it received,” she wrote. “Approximately $27.2 billion, or 24 percent, has been used for economic assistance and civilian security assistance (such as demining) to Ukraine, which is just as essential to Ukraine’s survival as military assistance. State and USAID have used 100 percent of this amount.”

In October, Biden sent congressional lawmakers a supplemental appropriations request. As we wrote then, the mammoth proposal rang up at about $106 billion in wide-ranging potential expenditures:

But if the aim of proposing a supplemental was to bypass the regular appropriations process—with all its fraught politics and pesky budget caps—the alternative has thus far proven to be a case of leaping out of the legislative frying pan and into the fire.

Republicans have floated tying Ukraine aid to border security before. This time it seems to be sticking, at least in part, because Biden’s national security supplemental already included funding for the border. “The president put funding for border security in the supplemental,” GOP Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah—a staunch supporter of Ukraine aid—told reporters yesterday. “He brought the topic to the table.” Ukraine’s urgent need paired with the drained coffers may also have created additional leverage for Republicans who want movement on the immigration issue.

A handful of Republican senators, led by Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, have been negotiating a deal with Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy. Republicans have proposed changes that would make migrants ineligible for legal asylum if they had traveled through a third country to get to the border without seeking asylum in that country as well. GOP negotiators are also looking to crack down on the Biden administration’s use of the executive branch’s vague humanitarian parole authority, a process by which otherwise “inadmissible” migrants—those who have not been granted asylum or received a visa of some kind—can be temporarily released into the country. The Biden administration has used parole as an incentive for Haitians, Venezuelans, and migrants of other nationalities to come into the country through legal ports of entry instead of crossing the border between them. “They want an unlimited ability to use parole,” Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a member of the Republican negotiating team, told The Dispatch’s John McCormack yesterday.

Traffic at the southern border continues to grow. In October, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had nearly 241,000 encounters—in which a migrant is detained, deemed inadmissible, or expelled—at the southern border, and 309,221 nationwide. Those figures were up slightly from October 2022, when CBP agents reported 231,529 encounters at the southern border and 278,317 nationwide. The number of people crossing the border illegally has consistently increased since June of this year, when the number of encounters at the southwest border stood at 144,556 in a month.

What about the border package already in the supplemental? “Biden throwing money at the problem won’t secure our border,” Lankford tweeted Tuesday, arguing the proposed funding for additional CBP agents was not a sufficient fix.

Negotiations for an immigration solution acceptable to both sides seemed to stall Friday over the parole issue, and this week, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer pitched letting Republicans attach amendments to the supplemental—any amendment they wanted—provided they secure the requisite 60 votes. There are, of course, only 49 Republican senators, so a 60-vote threshold would be a steep hill to climb—especially on a topic as divisive as immigration when negotiations haven’t yet yielded a breakthrough. It’s a hike Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell rejected out of hand Wednesday, telling Republicans in a press conference to scuttle the procedural measure before any amendment could even be presented in order “to make the point, hopefully for the final time, that we insist on meaningful changes to the border.”

Tensions were running high in the Senate on Wednesday afternoon, and the situation ultimately devolved into a shouting match during a classified briefing with high-level Biden officials—Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff C.Q. Brown. The meeting was originally planned as a virtual briefing by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, during which he could make his case for supplying more aid, but Zelensky canceled at the last minute. The meeting then became an informal opportunity for senators to hash it out all together—and it didn’t end well.

Senate Republicans—typically more staid than their House colleagues, but not without their factions or their tempers—have shown remarkable unity on the two issues that seem to divide even Republicans like no others. Emerging from the heated closed-door discussion, Romney and Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas—who has flip-flopped on his support for Ukraine and has lately been skeptical—sounded shockingly in-step.

“The question is not, ‘Does Ukraine need the money?’” Romney told reporters. “We agree Ukraine needs the money, and it’s in America’s interest to get the money to help Ukraine. But we also recognize the president put border security on the table. That’s part of this battle, and unless [Democrats] are willing to shut down the 10,000 [migrants] a day being released into the country, they’re not going to get a deal done.” (Romney seems to be referencing the average number of CBP encounters based on nationwide figures for the month of October.)

Marshall was on the same page. “If we can secure the border through meaningful policy changes, as well as a proper physical structure, then we can have the discussion and move on to Israel,” he said, suggesting he favors separating the issues into separate votes instead of passing them as one supplemental package. “And then we can move on to Taiwan, and then we can move on to Ukraine. But until we have meaningful border security, there’s nothing going to happen up here.”

Democrats, as one might imagine, saw the stakes differently. “I have lots of domestic issues I care about too,” Sen. Murphy, one of the lead Democratic negotiators, told reporters following the meeting. “I’m not holding Ukraine hostage to the resolution of health care or gun violence. [Republicans] made a choice to put Ukraine funding in jeopardy and they will all have to live with that choice. … They will rue the day that they decided to play politics with the future of Ukrainian security.”

As far apart as senators still seem to be, any compromise they did manage to piece together may yet be dead on arrival in the House. Speaker Mike Johnson has been more vocally supportive of aid to Ukraine recently, saying this week, “We can’t allow Vladimir Putin to march through Europe and we understand the necessity of assisting there.” However, he’s also drawn a line in the sand over immigration reform. “Supplemental Ukraine funding is dependent upon enactment of transformative change to our nation’s border security laws,” he wrote in a letter to the White House this week, adding that “the American people must be provided with answers to our repeated questions concerning: the Administration’s strategy to prevail in Ukraine; clearly defined and obtainable objectives; transparency and accountability for U.S. taxpayer dollars invested there; and what specific resources are required to achieve victory and a sustainable peace.” Johnson also pointed to immigration provisions in H.R. 2, or the Secure the Border Act—House Republicans’ immigration messaging bill from earlier in the year, which passed without a single Democratic vote. The bill was not taken up by Senate Democrats.

The halls of Congress will fall quiet next Thursday when lawmakers head back to their districts for the holiday recess, even as fighting continues apace on the Ukrainian front lines. But Marshall says we should skip the formalities and pack it all in now. “I’m telling you: Shut the place down, turn the lights out. Everyone might as well go home. Nothing’s happening until we secure the border.”

Worth Your Time

• As tributes to the late Justice Sandra Day O’Connor continue to pour in, Patti Davis—daughter of former President Ronald Reagan, who nominated the justice—points to an episode in O’Connor’s life that has slipped under the radar but is no less worth celebrating. “She spoke with rare candor about how Alzheimer’s disease plays out—with its heavy responsibility and complex ethical issues—within the private confines of a marriage,” Davis wrote in a guest essay in the New York Times. O’Connor talked openly about how her husband’s diagnosis impacted her work—she would often take Mr. O’Connor to the office—and in 2005 announced she would retire from the court to care for her husband full time. “My father had died two years before, and during the decade of his illness, I paid close attention to what other people chose to share about Alzheimer’s. There was a notable silence about placing a family member in a facility designed to provide safe, appropriate care. I so admired Sandra Day O’Connor’s openness, and I imagined the thousands of people in similar situations who felt gratitude that someone was shining a light on a dilemma that so many suffer through in the shadows. In 2007, she went even further, allowing her son Scott to disclose that John had fallen in love with a resident at the facility—and that he did so with the former justice’s blessing. … She continued to visit him, though he no longer recognized her. People with Alzheimer’s lose connections, memories become frayed threads, but the desire for companionship runs deep—deeper than the disease.”

Presented Without Comment

Mediaite: Trump Tells Hannity He Won’t Be a ‘Dictator’ If Elected—‘Except For Day One’

Also Presented Without Comment

Bloomberg: Biden Says He Might Not Have Sought Reelection If Trump Weren’t Running

Also Also Presented Without Comment

NBC News: White House Interns Demand a Middle East Cease-Fire in Letter to Biden

“Our decision to intern for your Administration was driven by our shared values and the profound belief that, under your leadership, America has the potential to be a nation that stands for justice and peace.”

Toeing the Company Line

• An Indian murder-for-hire plot, the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a preview of tonight’s GOP debate. Kevin was joined by Mary, Jamie, Chris, Mike, and Drucker to discuss all that and more on last night’s Dispatch Live (🔒). Members who missed the conversation can catch a rerun—either video or audio-only—by clicking here.

• In the newsletters: Nick took aim (🔒) at the progressives (still) supporting Hamas.

• On the podcasts: Sarah joins Jonah on The Remnant to discuss Hunter Biden’s alleged influence peddling and consider what a second Trump term would look like.

• On the site: Drucker reports on why GOP presidential have been hesitant to bring up Trump’s legal troubles, Michael Rubin analyzes Henry Kissinger’s legacy in South Asia, John Hart looks at Nikki Haley’s possible path to victory in the GOP primary, and Jonah opines on George Santos’ fate.

Let Us Know

If supplemental aid to Ukraine is not appropriated in the next few weeks, who do you think will be more responsible: Republicans, for demanding the funding is paired with additional border security measures, or Democrats, for refusing to relent on additional border security measures?

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