Senate Republicans ARE patsies

[Trump's July 25] 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?

  Politico

Not yet, I'll wager.

[S]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?

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.

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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.

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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.

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[Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma] 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.”

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“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.”

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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.

Patsy.

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.”

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.