The Democrats have buried an impeachment booby trap inside the $95 billion supplemental foreign aid bill that will waste another $61 billion on Ukraine’s unwinnable war with Russia.
Worse still, Republicans gleefully helped.
GOP Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio says the bill contains a provision that, should Donald Trump unseat President Joe Biden, invites a third impeachment if he tries to end aid to Ukraine.
And he would be impeached for the same reason he was impeached the first time: abuse of power because he stopped the aid.
Writing for The American Conservative today, Vance also described the “GOP plot” to stop Trump’s reelection, which might just mean they cooperated in planting the impeachment trap.
First Impeachment
“At the core of the impeachment was a pause on funds appropriated to Ukraine,” Vance noted, “$391 million in security assistance: $250 million through the Department of Defense’s (DOD) Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative and $141 million through the State Department’s Foreign Military Financing program.”
Democrats falsely argued that Trump paused the funds to force Ukraine to reveal details on the Biden-Burisma influence-peddling scheme, which involved the infamous phone call to Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky.
“Trump had abused his power,” Vance continued, “with the aim of interfering with the U.S. presidential election,” citing the impeachment report. “The President froze military assistance to Ukraine against U.S. national security interests and over the objections of career experts.” And he “did so despite the longstanding bipartisan support of Congress, uniform support across federal departments and agencies for the provision to Ukraine of the military assistance, and his obligations under the Impoundment Control Act.”
And therein lies trouble for Trump in 2025, should he try to end aid to Ukraine.
Noting that Trump said “we got to get that war settled and I’ll get it settled” and that he would end it in 24 hours, Vance observed that the bill under consideration includes $15.3 billion for Ukraine that will expire on September 30, 2025. That would be eight months into a possible third Trump term.
That money is in the “exact same accounts President Trump was impeached for pausing in December 2019,” Vance wrote. And “every single Republican” voted against the first Trump impeachment that was partly based on those grounds.
If President Trump were to withdraw from or pause financial support for the war in Ukraine in order to bring the conflict to a peaceful conclusion, “over the objections of career experts,” it would amount to the same fake violation of budget law from the first impeachment, under markedly similar facts and circumstances.
Partisan Democrats would seize on the opportunity to impeach him once again. The Washington Post has reported that tying President Trump’s hands on foreign policy is very much top of mind for Biden administration officials, who are openly boasting about their plans.
And It’s Part of a GOP Plot
As for the Ukraine funding bill itself, it was supposed to have included border-security measures, but this weekend, the Senate moved it without them. Supposedly Donald Trump persuaded Republicans to kill it, notably by opposition in the House that could not be overcome, because the “border security provisions” amounted to an amnesty and massive increase in cheap foreign labor. And the original would have spent three times the money on Ukraine as it does on securing the southwest border.
But Vance explained the devious machinations of the GOP leadership to fold on border security and continue subsidizing death and destruction on the other side of the planet.
“The story our leadership tells is that the ‘politics of border security’ had changed because of Donald Trump,” Vance wrote:
[Oklahoma’s GOP Senator] James Lankford dutifully negotiated a bipartisan border product. Conservative Republicans encouraged this negotiation. When the product took shape, Donald Trump demanded conservatives walk. Trump argued that Joe Biden didn’t need a border security package — which was true — so Republicans should ask simply that Joe Biden do his job. This intervention allegedly killed a great piece of border policy.
That “fairytale” was aimed at making Trump “look bad, perhaps by design.”
Conservative senators, Vance averred, had always said Biden could stop the invasion at the southwest border on his own authority, but because he wouldn’t, they would tie aid for Ukraine to the border.
But “the deal, as envisioned by conservatives, was apparently never on the table,” he continued:
According to both Democratic colleagues and some Republicans, this is because Republican leadership — specifically Mitch McConnell — refused to push the Democrats on this issue. Other Republicans have argued instead that even if Mitch McConnell empowered Lankford to make this demand, Democrats would have never agreed.
And conservatives in the Senate, Vance wrote, did not refuse the original Ukraine-border deal because of Trump. They already opposed it, and Vance didn’t speak to Trump about it until after the deal collapsed:
So the deal fell apart, and the way it fell apart was the height of political malpractice. The text — 370 pages of it — dropped late Sunday, February 4. We had a Republican conference meeting on Monday, well before anyone had time to digest major provisions. McConnell left the meeting and praised the bill but criticized the changing political dynamics. He blamed Donald Trump. He blamed the House of Representatives.
More trouble is head, Vance wrote. Once the new Ukraine bill goes to the House, Speaker Mike Johnson can’t entertain it without a border provision. If he does, he risks a rebellion. Democrats then might try a maneuver to force a vote that would cede power to leftist Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. He would need only a few Republicans to take over, like those who voted against the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Then would come the election-year campaign gift for the Democrats, courtesy of Mitch McConnell:
Speaker Johnson could fight this maneuver aggressively. If he does, he will be attacked by Senate Republican leaders, at least privately, and will face another negative news cycle. If he doesn’t, his own conference will turn against him. The cycle will replay over the government funding deadline in March. It will replay over the omnibus debate that follows. It will replay any time the U.S. Congress must actually do something.
Whatever shape this takes, the basic game will be the same. The media, obsessed with any story that makes Trump look bad, will blame him and “MAGA Republicans” in the House. They will blame Trump for the chaos. They will blame Trump for “extremism.” They will refuse to report on Biden’s failings and instead focus on internal Republican division. They will point to Republican senators attacking Donald Trump and House Republicans, just as they have over the last week. Democrats will run advertisements: “See, even Mitch McConnell thinks Trump is being ridiculous.” And they will rinse and repeat this narrative all the way to the November election.
As Forrest Gump’s mother said, “stupid is as stupid does.”
