Republican Tees Up Blow to MAGA With Help From Democrats

A GOP senator is looking to his Democratic counterparts for help to secure additional funding for Ukraine in what would be a blow to opposition from MAGA Republicans.

Republican Senator James Lankford, who is leading the border-Ukraine negotiations, is hoping to land a bill that receives wide support from his party, and just enough votes from Democrats to get past the 60-vote cloture threshold. Forgetting the likely Republican holdouts, Lankford told Politico that he's aiming for roughly 40 GOP votes on a funding bill, "which means I got to pick up 20 Democrats in the Senate."

"We're still swapping paperwork and we're still having conversations," Lankford said. "That doesn't feel like a breakdown to me. That feels like we're still working, just not making progress fast enough."

Lawmakers are looking to find bipartisan agreement on U.S. border security as Republicans hammer their Democratic counterparts to address immigration if they want to pass a $106 billion global security supplemental aid package that includes Ukraine. Democrats have spearheaded calls for more Ukraine funding, while talks of aid have fallen down the list of priorities for Republicans and become an outright non-starter for the party's most conservative members. Congress has been scrambling to come up with a last-minute aid package now that money has run out.

"Without congressional action, by the end of the year we will run out of resources to procure more weapons and equipment for Ukraine and to provide equipment from U.S. military stocks," Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young said in a Monday letter addressed to House and Senate leadership. "There is no magical pot of funding available to meet this moment. We are out of money—and nearly out of time."

It's been almost two years since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, and as time has passed, U.S. support for the fight has fallen.

Almost half of Americans, 45 percent, think that the country is spending too much on Ukraine aid, an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released last month found. The sentiment is driven primarily among Republicans, of whom nearly 6-in-10 agreed that the U.S. is spending too much to aid Ukraine. Comparably, 80 percent of Republicans supported humanitarian aid to Ukraine and 65 percent backed sending weapons to Ukraine in March 2022.

While most of the opposition to additional funding has been spearheaded by the hard right flank in the House GOP, including Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, there has also been pushback in the Senate.

Last May, 11 Senate Republicans, led by Senator Rand Paul, voted against supplemental aid. Paul is likely to head GOP objections again, as he signaled he would in September when he vowed to hold up any government spending bill that included aid to Ukraine.

"If leadership insists on funding another country's government at the expense of our own government, all blame rests with their intransigence," Paul said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, on September 28.

Newsweek reached out to Paul via email for comment on Lankford's plans to circumvent Republican opposition to Ukraine aid.

Republican Senator John Cornyn said there is "a misunderstanding" from Senate Democrats, who are still trying to find middle ground on the stricter immigration measures that Republicans want in exchange for Ukraine aid.

"This is not a traditional negotiation, where we expect to come up with a bipartisan compromise on the border," Cornyn told NBC News on Monday. "This is a price that has to be paid in order to get the supplemental."

Top Ukrainian officials—including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's chief of staff, Ukraine's minister of defense and the speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament—will be in Capitol Hill on Tuesday as they make a last-minute appeal to lawmakers to back supplemental aid before Congress breaks for the holidays on December 15.

Update 12/05/23 6:43 p.m. ET This story was updated to clarify the ongoing Senate negotiations.