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WASHINGTON — Weeks before the midterm elections, Austin Rep. Michael McCaul – the House Republican point man on Ukraine policy – averred that colleagues calling to cut off aid “may not understand what’s going on” with Russia.
Now poised to take over as chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, McCaul is embracing the rhetoric of more strident GOP lawmakers who demand “accountability” from the Biden administration and Ukraine, even as he rejects the idea of disengaging.
“We are going to provide more oversight, transparency and accountability. We’re not going to write a blank check,” he said Sunday on ABC’s This Week. “These are American taxpayer dollars going in. Does that diminish our will to help the Ukraine people fight? No. But we’re going to do it in a responsible way.”
Ten Texas Republicans voted against a $40 billion aid package for Ukraine as it sailed through the House 368-57, including Irving Rep. Beth Van Duyne and Austin Rep. Roger Williams, whose district reaches Johnson County just south of Fort Worth. The rest are from beyond North Texas.
Eleven Senate Republicans tried to block the aid. Texans John Cornyn and Ted Cruz joined the overwhelming bipartisan majority that quashed a filibuster and approved the aid, which President Joe Biden promptly signed into law.
“I don’t understand” the opposition to helping Ukraine financially, McCaul told The Dallas Morning News last month. “I grew up during the Cold War and I thought killing Russians was a good thing.”
McCaul said on ABC he’s optimistic that majorities in the House and Senate remain committed to providing whatever Ukraine needs as winter looms.
“It’s very important that the American people understand what’s at stake here,” he said. “If we lose in Ukraine, [China’s] Xi is going to look at Taiwan. And the Ayatollah’s already all in with Russia and China in this fight. And [North Korean strongman] Kim Jong Un now is providing artillery shells to Russia.”
But some in the GOP base object to spending so much to help another country – and that was before Congress signed off on another $12 billion.
“Oligarchs in Ukraine are getting enriched off of our taxpayer dollars, because we’re just dumping money, like truckloads of money,” Rep. Chip Roy, R-Austin, one of the Texans who opposed the aid package, told The News last month.
Both sides focused on Ukraine funding ahead of the midterm elections.
House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, widely expected to become the next speaker, linked Ukraine aid to domestic economic woes and concerns about security at the U.S.-Mexico border.
“People are going to be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine,” he said in September, asserting that Biden is “not doing the border, and people begin to weigh that. Ukraine is important, but at the same time, it can’t be the only thing they do, and it can’t be a blank check.”
Ohio’s incoming GOP Sen. J.D. Vance, the venture capitalist and Hillbilly Elegy author, said during the campaign that he’s ready to “stop the money spigot to Ukraine.”
“I think we’re at the point where we’ve given enough money in Ukraine,” he told a Toledo TV station.
Biden slammed Republicans for threatening to abandon a friend in need.
“These guys on the other team don’t get it,” he told Democrats in Philadelphia a few weeks before the elections. “It’s a lot bigger than Ukraine. It’s Eastern Europe. It’s NATO. It’s real serious, serious, consequential outcomes. They have no sense of American foreign policy.”
Some Republicans who supported the May aid tranche later said they’ll go no further.
“I’m rooting for Ukraine,” freshman Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Sherman, told constituents at an August town hall. But he assured them, “I will not be voting for any more money over the next 14 months, because they have what they need for now.”
On Sunday, McCaul criticized the Biden administration, saying it “slow walked” transfers of Stinger and Javelin missiles after the invasion in February.
Advocating for transfer of more HIMARS — rocket launchers that can hit targets 50 miles away, including in Crimea, which Russia annexed illegally in 2014, McCaul turned aside ABC host Martha Raddatz’s suggestion the U.S. might “incite Russia.”
Ukraine recently killed Iranian military advisers who were training Russians to use Iran-made drones.
“Crimea is not part of Russia under international law. So if they can hit into Crimea, that’s fair game,” McCaul said. “If we give them what they need, they win. If we don’t, it’s going to be a long, protracted war.”
McCaul, elected to his 10th term this month, plans to launch an inquiry into the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021.
That will mollify conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus — more than his resistance to impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. McCaul previously chaired the House homeland security panel. As president-elect, Donald Trump interviewed him for the post Mayorkas now holds.
McCaul said the record levels of unauthorized migration in the last year shows that Texas has “a wide-open border.”
“They are complicit with the biggest human trafficking event of our lifetime,” he said, but “I was a federal prosecutor. You’ve got to build a case. You need the facts, evidence before you indict.”