Heritage Action urges Mike Johnson to ‘hold firm’ against Biden’s $106 billion Ukraine, Israel request
Fox News
EXCLUSIVE: A top conservative group affiliated with the Heritage Foundation is pushing Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., to keep President Biden’s $106 billion supplemental aid request from coming to the House floor.
“Please do not undermine the gains that have been made on behalf of the American people by substituting one corrupt, unaffordable end-of-year deal for another. Hold firm to the convictions you and I and the American people share in common,” Heritage Action President Dr. Kevin Roberts wrote to Johnson.
He was particularly critical of the roughly $61 billion requested for Ukraine, a topic that has become a lightning rod within the GOP.
The package would include funding for Israel, Ukraine, the U.S. border, and humanitarian efforts, among other items. Republicans in both the House and Senate have warned that such a package would fail on its own.
“It is no surprise that President Biden and Senate Democrats would pursue such a reckless, aimless and feckless course. Sadly, it is also not surprising that a small number of Republican senators would join them. However, it is alarming to read reports that congressional Republicans are actively courting this supplemental spending package,” Roberts wrote.
On the House side, Johnson has made clear that he does not want to put the $106 billion package on the floor – he passed the roughly $14 billion in Israel aid as a standalone bill, with the money taken from the IRS, and has called for pairing the Ukraine aid with stricter border security measures and asylum laws.
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Ukrainian officials are visiting Capitol Hill on Tuesday as the situation for Kyiv’s fight against Russia threatens to grow dire without more U.S. aid. It comes after the White House’s Office of Management and Budget wrote a letter to congressional leaders warning that Ukraine will suffer serious losses if new U.S. aid is not approved this year.
Johnson responded to that letter on Tuesday morning that “supplemental Ukraine funding is dependent upon enactment of transformative change to our nation’s border security laws.”
But conservatives, including a growing number within the House and Senate GOP, are skeptical of the continued flow of foreign aid without confidence that the war has an end point.
Roberts accused Biden’s funding request for Ukraine of being overbroad, criticizing U.S. aims to help rebuild its war-ravaged economy.
“The House of Representatives should strongly oppose aid to Ukraine when the European Union, which lags far behind the United States in its military assistance to Ukraine, should be required to fund greater levels of aid for Ukraine,” he wrote.
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“Additionally, any military funding for Ukraine should include a publicly available accounting of how the U.S. contribution so far has been used in Ukraine,” he continued. “It should also be debated and considered on its own merits and be legitimately paid for, and not cloaked in so-called ‘emergency’ accounting gimmicks or combined with other funding provisions.”
“Furthermore, aid for Ukraine should not be provided until the administration provides a plan that defines the end goal in Ukraine, describes the expected U.S. commitment to achieve that goal, addresses the effects of the presidential drawdown authority on U.S. capabilities, and assures further commitments from our European partners. None of this will be included in the Senate’s supplemental package.”
He also reminded Johnson of conservative calls to pair any Ukraine aid with the House GOP’s H.R. 2 border and illegal immigration bill, something the Democrat-dominated White House and Senate have panned as a nonstarter.
Roberts met with Johnson to talk about the aims in the letter on Monday afternoon, Fox News Digital was told. A source familiar with their discussion categorized it as productive.