CV NEWS FEED // Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY, championed President Joe Biden’s call for additional billions of dollars in taxpayer funding for the Ukraine War.
In a Sunday interview with CBS’ Margaret Brennan, McConnell said he believes the proposed spending hike is justified given that “No Americans are getting killed in Ukraine.”
“We’re rebuilding our industrial base,” said McConnell. “The Ukrainians are destroying the army of one of our biggest rivals. I have a hard time finding anything wrong with that.”
The minority leader added that although he disagrees with the president on domestic issues, concerning Ukraine funding they are “generally in the same place.”
Both octogenarians have united on a recent push to “bundle” aid toward Ukraine and Israel in the same spending package.
Several congressional Republicans have taken the position that the United States should treat Ukraine’s war with Russia differently than Israel’s war against the terrorist group Hamas.
“I just think that’s a mistake,” McConnell told Brennan. “I view it as all interconnected.”
He further clarified his view:
We have big power competition from China, and Russia and we still have terrorism problems, as the Israelis have certainly experienced in a brutal way in the last week. So I think that requires a worldwide approach rather than trying to take parts of it out. It’s all connected.
The Chinese and the Russians said they’re now friends forever. Iranian drones are being used in Ukraine and against the Israelis.
McConnell also said that “a significant portion” of the proposed billions in aid would be spent within the United States, across 38 different states. He noted it would serve the purpose of “replacing the weapons that we sent to Ukraine with more modern weapons.”
Biden struck a very similar tone regarding the pair of foreign wars in his prime-time speech from the Oval Office last Thursday.
“And when we use the money allocated by Congress, we use it to replenish our own stores, our own stockpiles with new equipment,” he stated. “Equipment that defends America and is made in America.”
CatholicVote President Brian Burch strongly disagreed with McConnell and Biden. “Biden has asked for another $60 billion for Ukraine and $14 billion for Israel,” said Burch. “Insiders expect he’ll also throw in $14 billion to secure our own southern border to win over GOP lawmakers’ approval.”
“Let’s be clear,” Burch continued. “This is money we don’t have.”
He noted that several hawkish House Republicans “have no problem combining highly popular pro-Israel funding with increasingly unpopular Ukraine funding,” as McConnell did when he argued the two wars are “interconnected.”
“I’ll say it again: we don’t have this money,” Burch said:
We’re now going at least $104 billion into additional debt in one week alone. At this moment, the interest payments on our national debt are nearing $1 trillion annually. We spend more on interest that on veterans’ benefits, transportation, and education. What could you do with $1 trillion? Well, you can’t win a land war in Asia.
