Thursday, May 19, 2022

Ted Cruz Answers the Ukraine-Aid Bill’s Conservative Critics

By Jimmy Quinn

Thursday, May 19, 2022

 

With Ukraine expected to begin running out of ammunition on Thursday, the day of an expected Senate vote on a $40 billion aid package, Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) made a late, vocal, and unapologetic entry into the debate.

 

Speaking to the Senate on Wednesday evening, Cruz addressed the bill’s several critics. Eleven of his GOP colleagues earlier in the week had opposed moving forward with the legislation, citing multiple crises at home — inflation, the border, and baby-formula shortages — and concerns that funding the Ukrainian government may enable corruption. The historically hawkish Heritage Foundation objected to the legislation on similar grounds, surprising some observers.

 

Cruz conceded some of their points but argued, critically, that to take the Biden administration’s inability to craft effective legislation, and its failure to address domestic crises, as permission to do nothing would be tantamount to geopolitical suicide.

 

At the conclusion of his 25-minute speech, Cruz put the stakes bluntly.

 

“The reason we should support our Ukrainian allies who are fighting and killing Russian soldiers is because it protects American national security. It keeps America safer, and it prevents our enemies from getting stronger, from threatening the safety and security of Americans, and from driving up the cost the economic damage to Americans by hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars,” said Cruz. “America needs to be strong, strong enough to stand up to Putin. Strong enough to stand up to Communist China. Strong enough to defend the greatest nation in the history of the world.”

 

The Senate is expected to vote on, and to pass, the legislation today. In two procedural votes this week, only eleven Republicans opposed moving forward with the legislation.

 

But Cruz’s speech is nonetheless significant as a methodical, point-by-point explanation of exactly what the bill contains, how it funds U.S. national-security priorities, and why it is in the U.S. national interest to support Ukraine’s defensive efforts.

 

Given the level of support the bill already has, Cruz’s endorsement is not a necessary precondition for it to pass. By highlighting the issue, however, Cruz made a high-profile entry into the intra-conservative foreign-policy debate sparked by the package.

 

Previously, mainly conservative lawmakers critical of the bill had taken center stage. Last week, Representative Chip Roy (R., Texas) and Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) both made a splash by announcing their opposition. Roy complained that House leadership gave members only six hours to view the bill before voting, while Paul objected that Senate leadership was considering an amendment of his according to inadequate Senate procedure.

 

Coupled with Heritage’s outspoken stance against the legislation, conservative hawks supportive of the bill were, at least from a messaging perspective, on the back foot. While most Republicans in the House and Senate supported the package, most Americans heard only the arguments against it.

 

Cruz endeavored to rectify that, by acknowledging its faults and its critics’ strongest points, while explaining why those shortcomings were not enough to justify hitting the brakes altogether.

 

He would have preferred a “significantly smaller” proposal, he said, later echoing concerns that some portion of the funding would go toward Ukrainian government employees’ salaries — a fiscal black hole.

 

And the legislation’s opponents are right to worry about the trio of domestic crises that have metastasized in recent months — problems that “Democrats have deliberately made worse, inflicting pain on millions of Americans.”

 

But these concerns, he argued, should have no bearing on America’s outward-facing stance on national security. “We can’t let the fact that Biden and the Democrats have created massive domestic and economic failures cause us to ignore threats to U.S. national security posed directly by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine,” Cruz said.

 

The U.S. motivation to continue to assist Ukraine should recognize four factors, according to Cruz: that Putin would reconstitute an entity as dangerous to Americans as the old Soviet empire, that he would control the global energy supply and extort Americans, that the U.S. made a commitment to supporting Ukraine’s sovereignty in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, and that a victorious Putin in Ukraine may move next on a NATO member — drawing the U.S. into direct military confrontation.

 

Importantly, Cruz also provided an inventory of what the bill does. Some of the critics have pointed to a select list of items — many of which he said he also viewed as objectionable, but others that are indispensable.

 

It’s worth noting here that the claim, made by some opponents, that the aid package is merely a handout to Ukraine is factually incorrect. At least a third of the bill’s provisions allocate funding directly to U.S. weapons stocks or to hardship pay for service members whose lives have been upended by a U.S. posture uprooted to adapt to the Russian invasion.

 

As Cruz noted, $9 billion of the $40 billion is directed toward replenishing American stockpiles that were emptied and transferred to the Ukrainian military. “I do not know a senator in this body who could reasonably object to replenishing our own military stores and weaponry to keep America safe,” Cruz said.

 

He added that even some key funding for initiatives that do not go directly to America’s military are in the national interest, primarily $10 billion to support training and weapons transfers to Ukrainian forces. Their ammunition stockpiles, he warned, are dwindling amid the high-intensity pace of combat.

 

Even a $9 billion allocation intended for economic-support funds to the Ukrainian government, which he acknowledged would likely be partly eroded by corruption, is important. But, he noted, Democrats control Congress, and the result is a somewhat-wasteful bill.

 

“So the question facing each of us Republicans is whether you’re willing to cut off the missiles and cut off the bullets that we’re sending to Ukraine and allow Putin to win simply because there’s a portion of this bill that is waste and corruption that the Democrats have insisted on,” Cruz said. “The reality is that a Putin victory in Ukraine will be much, much more expensive for American taxpayers in the long run than this bill.”

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