“Beyond the merits,” as they like to say in Washington, two things stand out most for Congress when it comes to President Trump’s now famous July phone chat with Ukraine’s leader.
First, the revelations cut to the bone for Speaker Nancy Pelosi, given her roots in the same House committees most offended by the president’s conduct. Second, the call made patsies of prominent Senate Republicans, left hanging after they had tried to defend Trump’s handling of the Ukraine situation just weeks before.
The big question for both parties going forward is whether they’ll begin to reassert Congress’ power through the appropriations process. If not impeachment, are Senate Republicans embarrassed or troubled enough by Trump’s power grabs now to take a page from their Conservative Party kin across the pond in Britain, reasserting Parliament against their own Trump, Prime Minister Boris Johnson?
In the case of Pelosi, the California Democrat spent more than a decade on the House Appropriations Committee — including time on the panel charged with foreign aid. From 1993 to 2003, she was also on the House Intelligence Committee and has continued to play an active role in her ex officio status as a House leader.
Without doubt, she was influenced this week by the shifting currents in her caucus on impeachment. But when she spoke of a “grave new chapter of lawlessness,” it was also as Nancy Pelosi the legislator, not just as a political leader.
For Senate Republicans, the picture is more complicated. But some are having second thoughts after allowing Trump to run roughshod over Congress’ appropriations power.
Unlike aid for Puerto Rico or Central America, Ukrainian assistance is something the GOP cares about as much as Democrats do. Second, unlike Trump’s use of emergency powers to build his border wall, the president’s goal in this case had less to do with some shared goal for his party — such as slowing immigration — and more his political self-interest.
Indeed, given the revelations this week, it’s striking to revisit a debate on the same Ukrainian aid issue when the Republican-controlled Senate Appropriations Committee met to draft spending bills for the coming fiscal year.
The date was Sept. 12, just hours after the White House had sent notice to the committee that it was finally releasing Defense and State Department funds that lawmakers had approved in the 2018 and 2019 budgets for Ukraine.
Waiting any longer would have put the entire package in danger, since big portions of the appropriations were due to expire on Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year. This provoked a debate as to what to do next and how best to avoid a repeat performance by the White House going into 2020.
Led by Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), committee Democrats proposed to challenge the president by withholding a small portion of the 2020 Pentagon budget until the next installment of military aid for Kiev was released. Committee Chairman Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) prevailed on Durbin to withdraw his amendment, but not before a discussion that in retrospect, shows how clueless Republicans were about what was really going on at the White House.
Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), a member of the committee, is a highly educated attorney with a Phi Beta Kappa pin and degree from Oxford. He vowed to “burn fresh hell” if future aid to Ukraine were withheld again by the White House. Yet in the same voice, he plaintively turned to committee Democrats like Durbin and Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, asking them to explain what the stall had been about.
Providing no answer, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) assured his colleagues that the White House had learned its lesson and there would be no future delays in aid for Ukraine. “I think they’ve got the message. If you are listening in the Ukraine on C-SPAN, you’re gonna get the money,” Graham said.
In defense of the administration, perhaps no Republican walked out on a limb more than Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma.
Lankford has been a devoted supporter of Ukraine aid, traveling himself to Kiev around Memorial Day to meet with people close to the new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, after his election last spring. Like others on the committee, Lankford said he had become impatient with the delays but suggested it all could be explained by the president showing “due diligence.”
“I do think this year was an exceptional year,” Lankford said. “It was entirely reasonable that the United States spend a couple of months getting to know him [Zelensky], his administration and to figure out if he was going to be pro-Russian or pro-West. Because no one knew which direction Zelensky was going to go.”
“In the past several months, I think it took longer than it should have. I think we should have moved faster than we moved but there was due diligence in the process.”
Shelby also spoke of allowing time for “due diligence.” Yet from the summary released this week of the president’s actual conversation with Zelensky, there’s little evidence that this weighed heavily with Trump.
Instead, the president devoted more time to pressing Ukraine to do more to investigate his Democratic political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden.
In a brief interview Thursday, Lankford insisted that he did not feel used and saw nothing upsetting in the president’s remarks about Biden.
The Oklahoman said it was Zelensky who introduced the topic when the Ukrainian leader referenced his dealings with the president’s personal attorney Rudolph Giuliani, who had been Trump’s point man on the issue. “That doesn’t bother me and when I was there, all of the local press … the Ukraine press was obsessed with Rudy Giuliani. They were very focused on it so it didn’t surprise me that Zelensky brought it up.”
When the topic came up again in the Senate panel on Thursday this week, Graham again vowed: “I want to send a clear signal that we’re going to keep helping the Ukraine.” But Durbin reminded him: “The plot has thickened dramatically since then as to why [the Ukraine dollars] were being held and under what circumstances.”
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine
Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2019/09/27/trump-ukraine-senate-republicans-003788
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The Article Was Written/Published By: drogers@politico.com (David Rogers)
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