The hidden casualties of the GOP's civil war

It's been quite a week in the House of Representatives with MAGA superstar Matt Gaetz, R-Fl., leading a small band of incoherent revolutionaries to topple Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., just to show they could. Then all day Thursday the media was overwhelmingly excited at the rumor that Donald Trump was going to heroically run to the rescue of the House Republicans and save them from themselves by stepping in as the House Speaker. A faction led by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., enthusiastically endorsed him and it was announced that he would be traveling to the Capitol for the first time since January 6, 2021 within days. Sadly, late last night, Trump himself stuck a shiv in that trial balloon by announcing that he was endorsing Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio for the job, likely assuring his victory.

Before McCarthy was defenestrated he managed to get an extension on the budget deadline passed, averting another government shutdown, but with all the fireworks around his ousting and the jostling to replace him, not to mention the enormous ill will Gaetz and his friends have stirred in the caucus, it appears that clock may tick all the way down again without much being resolved before the next deadline. House Republicans have a long wish list of extreme policies they want to pass in this new budget and nobody seems to have told them that they don't have a majority in the Senate nor do they have the White House, which means that their dream agenda is dead on arrival anyway.

They want radical cuts in spending, process changes that are unconstitutional and a total reversal of American foreign policy, and they seem determined to hold their breath until they blow up the country if they don't get their way. There's little reason to believe that Trump's endorsee Jim Jordan will be able to deal with this insoluble problem any better than McCarthy did and even less reason to believe he wants to. He may not have joined the rebels in this instance but he's just as extreme as they are.

The most pressing of all the issues on the table is the continuation of American aid to Ukraine. There is still a bipartisan majority in Congress that supports the policy but a large and growing faction of the GOP is against it. With that small number of hard-right troublemakers determined to have their way, McCarthy was apparently only able to get the extension passed by eliminating that funding.

That was a huge victory for McCarthy's favorite wingnut, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has made the defunding of Ukraine aid her signature issue. According to this voluminous fact check, she is very confused about the recent history of the region and seems to have absorbed a lot of Russian talking points to back up her opinions. Last spring she spoke at a white nationalist event where they cheered the Russian invasion with chants of “Putin, Putin, Putin!” so perhaps that's where she got some of her ideas on the subject. But the most likely influence is former Fox News celebrity Tucker Carlson, who has been leading the American opposition to Ukraine.

Russia has shown its appreciation by featuring him heavily on its state-owned propaganda media:

https://youtu.be/_rBEpVz0J20?si=KsqF7Y7w3sXT3hIJ

As a result, there has been a non-stop drumbeat coming mostly from the right, but also some voices on the left, suggesting that the U.S. should withdraw support for the Ukrainian war effort. It's said by some that we can no longer afford it because we need the money to start a war with Mexico while others believe that it would be more compassionate to allow Russia to take over the country in the hopes that they will stop bombing, committing war crimes and abducting Ukrainian children. Some think the U.S. caused the problem by promoting NATO expansion so it's wrong for it to help Ukraine, the logic of which is still obscure to me.

Public opinion has shifted a bit as a result of these arguments. According to the Reuters/Ipsos poll, six months ago 46% supported sending arms to Ukraine while 29% opposed and the rest were unsure. As of this week, only 41% support it, 35% disagree and the rest are unsure. It's not exactly a groundswell but the opposition is growing among Republicans especially and it's giving oxygen to people like Greene in the House and Senators like Tommy Tuberville, R-Al., and Missouri's Josh Hawley who parrots Trump' tiresome line that Europe is freeloading (which is not true at all) and insists we need the money for our own border war.

At the moment it's just a handful in the Senate but last week 117 members of the House voted against training and equipping the Ukrainian military. As Greene reminded everyone, the Hastert Rule (named after the disgraced, Republican pedophile speaker Dennis Hastert) requires that no bill can be allowed to come to the floor if it does not have a GOP majority. Since Jim Jordan was one of those who voted against it, it's hard to see how this funding is going to happen if he does become Speaker. (He told the media that he wouldn't support bringing it to a vote but his office "clarified" it later, so who knows?)

Those of us who oppose military invasions of other countries, whether it's by Russia or the United States, are morally clear on America's obligation to help Ukraine. It's not even a hard call. And the stakes of allowing an emboldened Vladimir Putin to successfully expand Russia's borders by force in the region are enormous. As the New York Times' Paul Krugman points out the amount the U.S. is spending on humanitarian aid and military equipment is nominal and the positive consequences of doing so are already being felt.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

So why are these right-wingers, who not so long ago were ready to send American troops abroad at the drop of a hat, suddenly refusniks when it comes to helping Ukraine? Some of it is an affinity with Vladimir Putin and the Russian system he currently oversees. It's an authoritarian, white, Christian regime that has no use for gays or racial minorities or dissent. It's their kind of place.

And it also springs from a trollish pretense that fatuously declares that Democrats are the warmongers while they just want to give peace a chance. (It's not the first time they've done this. They did it in the 1990s during the Balkan War as well. )It's nonsense of course. They're more bloodthirsty today than they've ever been. Whatever the motives, at this moment it's hard to see how anyone can thread this needle and it's particularly difficult to see how Jim Jordan can do it. He's an ideologue, not a deal maker.

Perhaps the best hope those of us who don't want to abandon Ukraine have is that Donald Trump will tell Jordan and Greene and the rest of his House sycophants that they need to fund Ukraine until the election. He has a secret plan to end the war, you know, and it's the best plan in the history of secret plans. They should at least keep things going until the very stable genius can get back in the White House and fix the whole thing up properly, don't you think? Not even Marjorie Taylor Greene could object to that.