When the Senate voted 70-29 Tuesday to send more aid to Ukraine, Republican Leader Mitch McConnell was in the majority of senators – but in the minority of his own party. It was an important marker for the nation’s longest-serving Senate leader.
For most of his career, the Kentuckian has been known for his use of political power, and not so much for acting on principle. But in this case, he fought for what was once a core value of the Republican Party: internationalism, with the United States as the pole holding up the tent of world order.
In a party led by Donald Trump, that has not only ceased to become a core value, but something for Republicans to campaign against. Trump opposed the bill, which has $60 billion to help Ukraine repel Russia’s invasion (and $14 billion to help Israel fight Hamas, which cost it some Democratic votes).
Al Cross (Twitter @ruralj) is a professor in the University of Kentucky School of Journalism and Media and director emeritus of its Institute for Rural Journalism. His opinions are his own, not UK’s. He was the longest-serving political writer for the Louisville Courier Journal (1989-2004) and national president of the Society of Professional Journalists in 2001-02. He joined the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame in 2010.
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McConnell is also known for acting with political motives, but in this case, Republicans’ Senate campaign chair, Steve Daines of Montana, said they would be hurt by passing a foreign-aid bill without the border-security measures on which the House is insisting.
Remember, the House rejected the Senate’s bipartisan border-security bill because Trump wants to use immigration as a campaign issue. If this craziness continues, Ukraine, or much of it, will become part of Russia and the standing of our country will be greatly damaged at a perilous time.
“By any objective standard, the world is in a very, very challenging phase,” McConnell told me. “We now have two major-power competitors . . . and we have what Reagan would have called an axis of evil . . . with Iran funding all these proxies. . . . I think this is a uniquely dangerous position for our country and the world.”
With most Republican senators not voting that way, McConnell said he has sometimes felt like Winston Churchill “warning about the Germans” before World War II – in which his father was a soldier and “met the Russians” in what is now Czechia in 1945. “We have some letters he wrote to my mother . . . saying he thought the Russians were going to be a big problem, and that certainly proved to be true.”
McConnell entered politics as a moderate Republican, but moved rightward with his party to climb its leadership ladder. He had largely stopped doing that as it became more Trumpian, so this wasn’t the first time he has been in a minority of his caucus. Other examples include the big infrastructure bill and measures to raise the national-debt limit and keep the government open.
“There are a number of members who are glad these matters get taken care of, but for some reason or another don’t want to vote for them,” McConnell said. According to The Wall Street Journal, 19 Republican senators voted the infrastructure bill in 2021, and 17 voted to raise the debt ceiling in June 2023.
Keeping the government open in early March, and avoiding the blame that always attaches to Republicans when it shuts down, is likely to be McConnell’s next test. He can do little for the Ukraine-aid bill in the House, other than what he has already done – publicly call on struggling Speaker Mike Johnson to put the bill up for a vote.
“The politics are difficult but the facts are simply overwhelming,” McConnell told me.
That sounds like a failure of the political system. McConnell said he didn’t mean it that way: “I’m just trying to focus on the facts and the right thing for our country and the free world.”
This is the latest chapter in a long struggle between the forces of internationalism and isolationism, largely among Republicans. Isolationism prevailed in the GOP before World War II, but after it, enough Republicans changed their minds for the nation to adopt internationalism. Republicans did that after 1952, when they chose an internationalist, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, as their presidential nominee, and he was elected twice.
Today’s GOP bears little resemblance to that one, and Trump is its ruler, as Republicans in Congress kowtow to him, pleasing voters who want simple answers to complex problems. “I think the declining support for Ukraine is almost entirely because our nominee for president doesn’t think it’s a good idea,” McConnell told the Journal.
McConnell usually talks little about Trump, because casting aspersions at the leader of your party is not a way to maintain your influence. Getting 21 Republicans to vote with him was something of a victory over Trump, but that very observation is an indicator of McConnell’s reduced influence.
McConnell’s health issues lead many to think he will give up the leader’s job after this year, but he’s mum on that. He will be 82 Tuesday, and his Senate term runs through 2026. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who didn’t vote with him on Ukraine, told reporters that McConnell could probably be re-elected leader even if Trump wins the presidency.
The election will also determine Senate control, and Republicans are reasonably hopeful about regaining it. McConnell would surely relish one more round as majority leader, and he’s all about politics when it comes to regaining control. On Ukraine, he told me, “Our non-incumbents can take whatever position they want to on this issue.”
