Putin beordrar styrkor att gå in i Ukraina - INVASION NU (2022-02-24)

Senators on Sunday released the details of a $118.2 billion bipartisan aid proposal for Ukraine, Israel and the southern U.S. border, after months of painstaking, closed-door negotiations.

The long-awaited bill requests $60.1 billion for Ukraine aid, $14.1 billion for Israel and $20.2 billion to improve security at the U.S. border. It also includes smaller pockets of funding for humanitarian assistance in war-torn regions, and defense operations in the Red Sea and Taiwan.

Despite the White House’s scolding, the funding package has increasingly grown into a political pawn over the past few weeks.

As the election kicks into high gear, Republican lawmakers who once appeared ready to compromise have suddenly gone cold on the deal, aware that its passage would make a convenient victory for the Biden 2024 campaign.

But former president and GOP frontrunner Donald Trump has reportedly put pressure on Republicans to torpedo the deal so that he can continue using the border crisis as a line of attack in his campaign.

In a Sunday interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Johnson denied that Trump had any outside influence: “He’s not calling the shots. I am calling the shots for the House.”

But a week after Johnson’s optimistic meeting with Schumer and Biden, the speaker reversed course and expressed cynicism about the deal.

“If rumors about the contents of the draft proposal are true, it would have been dead on arrival in the House anyway,” Johnson wrote in a letter to his colleagues in late January.

The White House has called out the mood swing.

“Suddenly, we’ve heard a change of tune,” Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a recent briefing. “Actually tackle the problem instead of playing politics with it.”