Ukraine bill backers should fight on front line, says Republican
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Members of Congress who vote for a major Ukraine funding bill should be conscripted into the country’s military, a hard-Right Republican has argued.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, a close ally of Donald Trump, has proposed a series of amendments to a $95 billion (£76 billion) foreign aid package the House of Representatives is due to vote on after months of delay.
The package passed the Senate in February but has been stalled in the Republican-led chamber with the party divided over the ballooning cost of supporting Kyiv.
Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, has said the logjam from Kyiv’s biggest military backer has cost it lives and territory.
Mike Johnson, the Republican house speaker, has now said he is “willing to take the personal risk” of a rebellion within his party to bring the bills to fund Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, to the floor for a vote.
In a concession to hard-line Republicans, $9 billion of economic assistance for Kyiv is to be structured as forgivable loans.
Democratic support for Mr Johnson’s plan will be essential, given the razor-thin Republican majority in the House and opposition from far-Right Republicans.
Ms Taylor Greene is one of a handful of hardliners who have signalled they are willing to oust Mr Johnson from the speaker’s chair if the vote goes ahead, just months after Republicans deposed their last speaker, Kevin McCarthy, in a similar rebellion.
Mr Johnson has vowed to continue amid the threat of being booted out of power by his own party, casting himself as a “wartime speaker”.
“I think providing lethal aid to Ukraine right now is critically important,” he said, adding: “I’m willing to take personal risk for that.”
In a symbolic show of protest, Ms Taylor Greene has proposed a series of amendments to the package that would require any member of Congress who votes in favour of it “to conscript in the Ukrainian military”.
“I mean if you want to fund the war, why don’t you go fight in it?” she added.
The far-Right Georgia congresswoman has previously shared conspiracies, including that a mass school shooting was a hoax and the anti-Semitic suggestion that Jewish-financed space lasers caused wildfires in California in 2018.
In her amendments to the foreign aid package, Ms Taylor Greene also called for “space laser technology” to be deployed at the Mexico border. rather than providing additional support for Israel’s war in Gaza.
“Israel has some of the best unmanned defense systems in the world,” she wrote on Twitter, alongside a proposed amendment to the bill. “America needs to take our national security seriously and deserves the same type of defense for our border that Israel has and proudly uses”.
While Ms Taylor Greene is on the ideological fringe of her party in some regards, her opposition to Ukraine aid is shared by a growing number of populist hardliners.
Another conservative congressman, Matt Gaetz of Florida, described Mr Johnson’s decision to move ahead with the foreign aid bills as tantamount to “surrender” to the Democrats’ demands.
Mr Trump has also been sceptical of supporting Kyiv, but offered Mr Johnson some political cover by praising him for doing a “very good job” during an event with the house speaker last week.
Joe Biden has been urging Congress, which controls the government’s purse, to pass the foreign aid package since October.
“The House must pass the package this week, and the Senate should quickly follow,” the US president said.
“I will sign this into law immediately to send a message to the world: We stand with our friends, and we won’t let Iran or Russia succeed.”
