Now Do Ukraine
Plus: Biden pushes Senate to act on TikTok while Trump waffles and his surrogates quarrel on the bill.
Republicans in the House are about to lose yet another seat in their tiny majority: Rep. Ken Buck, who was already planning to retire at the end of the term, abruptly announced this week he will leave Congress at the end of next week. Expect to see Speaker Mike Johnson going office to office in the months ahead, making sure his members are exercising regularly, sleeping enough, and taking all their pills.
Happy Thursday.
Now Do Ukraine
Well, the House acted on the TikTok legislation. The bill requiring TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell the app moved quickly and passed with an overwhelming, bipartisan majority. National security experts whom I trust think the legislation is worthwhile and important.
But you know what’s also worthwhile and important? And even more urgent? And an even more obvious case of doing the morally and practically right thing? Providing support for Ukrainians who are fighting and dying to defend their nation and their freedoms against Putin’s brutal invasion.
So do Ukraine now!
There is some good news. Though Speaker Mike Johnson still refuses to act, two discharge petitions that would bring Ukraine aid to the floor were introduced this week and are currently circulating. If either is signed by 218 House members—a majority of the body—it could be brought to the floor for a vote over Johnson’s objections.
One of these petitions would force a vote on the bill that easily passed the Senate last month. It has 177 Democratic signatures and no Republicans. The other petition includes some border provisions and has some minor differences from the Senate legislation; six moderate Democrats and eight Republicans have signed on.
I worry that this exercise could end up being a kind of gamesmanship which allows different members to say they’re doing something, while neither measure gets 218 signatures and nothing actually gets done. But members assure me that’s not the case. If they’re right, at some point the efforts will come together, and there will be a breakthrough.
But soon, please! This should have happened months ago. There’s already been too much delay.
One point about standing with Ukraine that I’ve been thinking about. It came up in my conversation with Tim Snyder the other day (watch, listen, or read here). Here’s Snyder:
I have spent a lot of time the last couple of years talking to Republican elected officials and others about Ukraine. The people who have a moral vocabulary about Ukraine also have a moral vocabulary about the U.S. There’s some set of moral commitments out there.
Whereas the people who diminish Ukraine, or who try to push it aside, or who repeat Russian talking points, they also don’t have the moral vocabulary about the U.S. About the US, it’s also always about criticizing, dismissing, making fun, mocking. There’s nothing positive there.
To put it another way: If you’re anti-Ukraine, you’re very likely pro-January 6th. If you’re anti-January 6th, you’re pro-Ukraine. If you’re fine with authoritarianism at home, you’re fine with Putin’s invasion, and vice-versa. So standing with Ukraine is a marker of standing against authoritarianism not just abroad but at home as well.
That’s one reason why the organization I’m associated with, Defending Democracy Together, which is focused on defending democracy and the rule of law here at home, also features the effort Republicans for Ukraine.
Today the group launched a new, quarter-million dollar advertising campaign featuring Republican voters from across the nation making the case to House Republicans that it’s past time to act to support Ukraine. Here’s our new 60-second spot.
The campaign aims to build support for Ukraine among House Republicans by presenting them with credible messengers—actual Republican voters—encouraging their elected leaders to do everything they can to defend American values and interests by supporting Ukraine.
One last note: I was speaking a couple of weeks ago with someone close to the Nikki Haley campaign who’d traveled extensively with Haley. She reported that one of the most surprising things they discovered while campaigning was that Haley’s foreign policy message—pro-Ukraine, anti-Putin, pro-NATO, pro-America’s role in the world—resonated more with voters than many of the standard domestic issues. Americans may not be experts on foreign policy, but they do sense when something fundamental is at stake in the world, and they know this is the case in Ukraine.
Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee, so there won’t be any leadership on this from him. But this is a moment when other Republicans, by stepping up to do the right thing for Ukraine, might also begin to lay the groundwork for a healthy Republican party—if that’s possible—after Trump.
The Ukraine fight is of course a fight about Ukraine. It’s also a fight about America.
—William Kristol
Strange Anti-TikTok Bedfellows
Here’s a reading of the White House’s handling of the TikTok bill that has seemed plausible: Biden shares the bipartisan national-security fears which originally motivated the bill in the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party—but he’s leery of the electoral consequences of signing a law that could wind up banning a hugely popular app in an election year. So perhaps he would make a show of support for the bill in the House, then count on Chuck Schumer to let it quietly die in the Senate.
Well, seems not: Hours after the House overwhelmingly passed the bill Wednesday morning by a 352-65 vote, the White House gave its strongest signal of support yet.
“We hope the Senate takes action and takes this up very quickly,” Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters aboard Air Force One Wednesday while en route to a day of official and campaign events in Wisconsin.
That call to make haste stood in contrast with signals that Senate Democrats would be more comfortable playing things slow. “The Senate will review the legislation when it comes over from the House,” Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told CNN, adding he wanted to see the bill go through the committee process.
Meanwhile, Trump’s opposition to the TikTok ban has caused a rare outbreak of disagreement among his most faithful backers in government and out. Some, like Reps. Lauren Boebert and Anna Paulina Luna, voted to pass the bill. Others voted against it, including Rep. Matt Gaetz, who said that he supported cracking down on TikTok but opposed the rushed process of passing the bill through the House. In the Senate, Trumpy lawmakers who still retain some libertarian DNA, like Sens. Rand Paul and Mike Lee, said they’d oppose the bill as well.
Outside Congress, things are more rancorous. Trump’s sudden support for TikTok has been widely seen as a result of the persuasive work of allies with skin in the game—not just billionaire Jeff Yass, the donor with a heavy TikTok investment who recently met with Trump, but also former aide Kellyanne Conway, who has been lobbying in support of TikTok on behalf of another recipient of Yass’s largesse, the conservative Club for Growth.
To Trump’s more populist allies, this is all insanely swampy stuff. Why did Trump flip? “Simple: Yass Coin,” Steve Bannon wrote on social media. Laura Loomer, a fringey MAGA activist who delights in skewering the GOP establishment, hasn’t gone after Trump, but she’s taken a blowtorch to those Republicans who have joined him in opposing the ban: “These members of Congress and the United States Senate who are saying that they are opposed to a ban on TikTok—they are all whores,” she said on Bannon’s War Room podcast yesterday. “You can’t call yourself America First and be pro-TikTok,” she added in a tweet.
Inside Trump’s campaign, senior staff are particularly annoyed with Conway, who didn’t give them a heads up she was lobbying Trump on TikTok. So his flip-flop “exploded like a bomb” inside the campaign, one source told us.
To complicate matters further, even Trump now appears to be inching away from his previous defense of TikTok. “I didn’t say anything other than you have to look at Facebook,” he said in a primetime Newsmax interview last night. “Facebook is the enemy of the people.”
—Andrew Egger
Catching up . . .
A new surge in power use is threatening U.S. climate goals: New York Times
Democrats prepare to go to war against third party candidates: NBC News
As Biden impeachment fails, House Republicans explore criminal referrals: New York Times
Biden eyes chance to bully Trump on TikTok and China: Axios
Study finds CDC’s maternal death rates may be sharply overstated: Axios
Inside the steel deal that has Biden on edge: Wall Street Journal
Quick Hits
1. James Lankford’s Aftermath
Last month, Senate Republicans hung one of their own out to dry, defecting en masse from the border/Ukraine compromise package that had been negotiated by Sen. James Lankford. Up at the site today, Will Saletan has a great piece meditating on what the whole boondoggle means for the party, and where a guy like Lankford goes from here:
[Lankford’s] a border hawk. On this issue, as on many others, he supports Trump’s executive actions, not Biden’s. But when it comes to passing laws, it’s Biden, not Trump, who’s willing to act now to alleviate the problem.
Last week, in his State of the Union address, Biden saluted Lankford’s bill. The president noted that the bill would hire thousands of border security agents, asylum officers, and immigration judges and that it would authorize the president to “shut down the border” when the flow made normal procedures unmanageable. As Biden recited these facts, Johnson sat behind him, shaking his head and rolling his eyes. But Lankford, captured on camera, nodded at the president’s words and said, “That’s true.”
On Sunday, in two national TV interviews, Lankford stood by what he had said during the speech . . .
The GOP’s betrayal of Lankford marks a new stage of its degeneration. The party isn’t just shunning members who try to hold Trump accountable, as Romney did, or excommunicating those who defend the Constitution, as Cheney did. It’s attacking a lawmaker for trying to do the most basic part of his job: solving a problem. Lankford thought the party’s mission was to enact conservative policies and help people. He has learned, in the bitterest way, that he was wrong.
2. ‘At Noon Against Putin’
Russia’s next sham election begins tomorrow, and Vladimir Putin will romp once more to reelection—not too hard to do when you control the levers of autocracy and have had all your most prominent political opponents disqualified, jailed, and/or murdered. But the election may also make visible a glimpse of resistance sparked by Alexei Navalny, the dissident who died in a Russian prison just under a month ago. Politico reports:
Imprisoned and often kept in solitary confinement, Navalny grew visibly gaunt during his three years in the Russian penal system. But even isolated in the country’s far north, he was still able to get messages through to his supporters, throwing his weight behind a plan to mobilize the opposition during this weekend’s presidential election.
On Feb. 1, a message was posted on his account on the social media platform X, marking his first instructions ahead of a presidential vote taking place this weekend.
“I like the idea of anti-Putin voters going to the polling stations together at 12 noon,” Navalny wrote. “At noon against Putin.”
As a plan, it had its attractions. The protest, a series of flash mobs across the country, would be nationwide, legal and relatively safe. “Well, what can they do?” Navalny added. “Will they close the polling stations at 12 noon? Will they organize an action in support of Putin at 10 a.m.? Will they register everyone who came at noon and put them on the list of unreliable people?”
It had long been clear the election would be neither free nor fair: Putin would be the only real candidate standing, with all his prominent critics either dead, imprisoned, in exile or struck off the ballot. But by simply showing up at the appointed hour, Russians could voice their disapproval and expose the vote—intended by the Kremlin to deliver the ultimate acclamation of Putin after his assault on Ukraine—as bogus.
Navalny’s death just over two weeks later—officially from natural causes, a claim vehemently disputed by his supporters and family who maintain he was murdered—has given the movement new impetus.
Cheap Shots
"To put it another way: If you’re anti-Ukraine, you’re very likely pro-January 6th. If you’re anti-January 6th, you’re pro-Ukraine. If you’re fine with authoritarianism at home, you’re fine with Putin’s invasion, and vice-versa. So standing with Ukraine is a marker of standing against authoritarianism not just abroad but at home as well."
Bingo. Now count the per capita number of republicans in congress, the senate, party institutions (the RNC, think tanks, etc.) and the party's base who are pro-J6th and anti-Ukraine, pro-authoritarian and Putin-indifferent. That's a shocking number of Americans leveling moral depravity at our national politics. I guess the upshot is that they're still technically in the minority of their party at various tiers, but they're growing instead of receding by the look of things. Let's hope that the rates of change depart from their current trajectories.
Just think about James Lankford for a minute. (And no, by "think" I don't mean "spit out the usual knee-jerk insults.") The man is an arch-conservative, an evangelical, and a Trump supporter. And he just stood up, did a difficult right thing on the immigration bill, and did another (refuse to join GOP carnival of lies) during the SOTU.
Discrepancies like this -- when a person (or group) (or, hell, a weather pattern or virus mutation) does something that breaks with the pattern we expected to see -- give us a priceless window into something we don't understand, and a chance to understand it better and maybe become more effective.
There are probably 1000 insights could be gained from Lankford's choices. I'm not going to share mine because it would only distract from the larger point, which is: when something breaks the pattern like this, respect it, pay attention, and try to learn from it. LISTEN.
Empathy >> situational awareness >> better tactics >> winning.