I spent Super Bowl Sunday stuck in our nation’s capital, trying to prevent Democrats, along with some of my Republican colleagues, from giving away $60 billion of your tax dollars to Ukraine. If they are successful, Congress would be complicit in sending more money to Ukraine than the entire budget of our Marine Corps.
I wanted to watch the big game from home in Auburn, but I’ll stay in D.C. until hell freezes over if it means stopping the bipartisan Forever War Caucus from printing another $60 billion to prolong a war that cannot be won.
On Thursday night, shortly after the Senate voted to take up the Ukraine bill, an interview with Vladimir Putin went live on the internet. Let me be clear: Vladimir Putin is no saint, but he said quite clearly that he was willing to cut a deal to end the war.
That’s more than I can say for the warmongers in D.C. Shortly after taking office, Joe Biden bloviated that "diplomacy was back" now that he was in the Oval Office. We haven’t seen an iota of diplomacy, or frankly even competency, from Joe Biden ever since.
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The peace negotiation conversations should have been happening since the onset of Russia’s invasion, but here we are years later, and Joe Biden hasn’t done a thing besides fork out more and more money.
Putin said on Thursday night that he had a peace agreement with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to stop the killing, but the Biden administration strong-armed Zelenskyy into backing out of it. We ought to try a little diplomacy for once and stop the fighting, which has already resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians alike.
There are times when the United States can and should get involved in a war overseas. This is not one of them.
First, we can’t. We are $34 trillion in debt and borrowing an additional $80,000 per second. Our munitions are already depleted from Joe Biden’s giveaways, and we are facing the possibility of war in the Middle East and in the South China Sea. We are broke, and we have too little to show for it.
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Second, even if the U.S. were flush with cash, we shouldn’t get involved in this war, simply because the United States has no strategic interests at stake in Eastern Europe.
We all want Ukraine to win, but we cannot bankroll every war just because we sympathize with one belligerent or another. There are other wars going on around the world right now, but the media is only paying attention to one of them.
We are a nation with strong ideals, and that is a good thing. However, leadership requires making tough decisions, and we must prioritize the needs of all over the wants of a few.
Our country is in serious trouble right now, with a wide-open southern border allowing illegal aliens, drugs, and crime into our country every single day. Our cities have been handed over to the criminals, our military can’t recruit, and working families are struggling to afford gas and groceries.
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While we have strong sympathies for the Ukrainian people, we have urgent problems at home that must be addressed, and this war does not affect the well-being of Alabama’s working families. My responsibility as a United States senator is to uphold the Constitution and to be the voice for the people of Alabama – not to every country in the world that we like.
We have already given Ukraine $120 billion, only to watch the war descend into a years-long stalemate. Another $60 billion will not turn the tide in the war. It would take several months to get there, and won’t accomplish what $120 billion and a worldwide campaign of isolating Russia has failed to achieve.
The arguments from the Money Printing Caucus just don’t add up. The Washington Post even published an article arguing that another bailout to Ukraine was a good idea – as a payoff to America’s defense industry. They want us to give away our weapons and then buy new ones. How about we just skip the first part and just buy new weapons for our troops?
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The idea that we should prolong the killing of people far away in order to enrich our defense contractors is repugnant and at tension with the preachy and moralistic tone of Ukraine’s boosters in D.C. In different times this kind of argument took place in a smoky back room and was known as profiteering; in our time it gets printed in the Washington Post.
I haven’t voted for a dime of Ukraine funding, and I’m not going to start now. I’ll stay here in the swamp as long as it takes.