In an interview this Wednesday on the MSNBC program “Morning Joe,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) condemned recent turns taken by the Republican Party as reflective of an interest in supporting the world’s dictators.
This week in the House, the chamber’s slim GOP majority approved an impeachment of Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, teeing up an impeachment trial in the Senate that will almost certainly result in acquittal. A vocal share of the GOP has been rejecting actual opportunities for action on both the border and foreign aid for countries including Ukraine, which were linked in recent legislative negotiations.
“But what we’ve got is a right-wing, isolationist, MAGA cult that has overtaken the Republican Party, and they know that democracy and freedom are under siege all over the world, and they want to be on the side of the tyrants, the autocrats, and the dictators,” Raskin said.
The Senate managed to approve a foreign assistance package, but GOP leadership in the House quickly started complaining.
Raskin also noted that Republicans in Congress were acting in concert with the explicitly expressed ambitions of Donald Trump himself, the ex-president and continued front-runner for this year’s presidential nomination from the GOP. Trump opposed a border/foreign aid deal that sunk earlier in the Senate, and he’s complained about the progression up to this juncture of U.S. assistance for Ukraine, which has most prominently taken the form of weapons deliveries. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) explicitly tied his opposition to the later aid package that did pass the Senate to Trump’s stance, arguing for a loan providing assistance to Ukraine rather than what he characterized as a grant.
The bipartisan deal that combined foreign assistance with border policy would have created major changes in the latter, providing the federal government new powers to shut the southern border between established crossing points in circumstances of particular strain. Republicans deemed it still deficient.
