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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