Speaker Johnson Shouldn’t Fold on Ukraine War Funding

There are rumblings that Speaker Mike Johnson is about to cave on his pledge not to approve any more spending on the Ukraine War:

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told Republican senators Wednesday to expect the House to send them legislation to help Ukraine, but cautioned that what comes out of the House will look substantially different than the $95 billion foreign aid package the Senate passed last month.

Johnson tried to reassure frustrated GOP senators who asked him about funding for Ukraine during a question-and-answer session at the annual Senate Republican retreat, which was held at the Library of Congress.

Johnson told senators that the House will send a Ukraine aid package to the Senate but floated the idea of making it a loan or lend-lease program so U.S. taxpayers would not be shelling out tens of billions of dollars without any expectation of getting a return, according to senators who participated in the discussion.

The Speaker also talked about including something similar to the REPO for Ukrainians Act, sponsored by Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), which would authorize the confiscation of Russian sovereign assets and deposit the proceeds of liquidated property into a Ukraine support fund, senators said. Notably, Johnson did not say whether such a Ukraine aid package would include tough border security reforms, such as “Remain in Mexico” language, which would face opposition from Senate Democrats.

The Speaker should be commended for holding out as long as he has, but he and the Republicans ought to continue to hold the line; they ought not to buckle – for a host of reasons.

First, the Zelensky regime continue to show their totalitarian colors, as they have recently arrested yet another group of Orthodoxy clergy and journalists to silence the opposition as the Ukrainian parliament prepares to vote on a bill to ban the Ukrainian Orthodox Church on phony charges of ‘Russian collusion’:

OrthoChristian reported on Wednesday that Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) agents raided the offices of representatives of the Union of Orthodox Journalists (UOJ) and the Legal Defense Center of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

Yesterday, the Union of Orthodox Journalists reported, with reference to the Prosecutor General that more than 20 searches were conducted in four provinces, also involving journalists from the First Cossack outlet and the public union Laity.

The Prosecutor General’s office wrote that the SBU neutralized the “media bloc of the UOC,” allegedly created to destabilized Ukraine. The UOJ notes that the Prosecutor General’s message says nothing about the alleged association with the Russian Security Service (FSB), as was claimed in the earlier SBU statement.

The UOJ published an open appeal to international human rights organizations to respond as they are able to the “detention and persecution” of the journalists, lawyers, and human rights defenders. Five people are currently being held in a pre-trial detention center.

“We are being judged for the published facts of crimes against the UOC, their analysis and value judgments on this matter,” writes the UOJ, while Laity and the Center for Legal Defense are being persecuted for fighting to uphold human rights.

The UOJ also writes that it is no coincidence that the arrests were made just before the parliamentary vote a on a bill to ban the Ukrainian Orthodox Church: “We believe that the arrests … were undertaken to conceal and successfully push through the criminal decision that the Ukrainian authorities are preparing in relation to the Church.”

The head of the human rights organization Public Advocacy informed the UN Human Rights Council about the investigation into the journalists on Wednesday.

Lawyer Robert Amsterdam, who is representing the Ukrainian Orthodox Church for free, also tied the arrests to the state plans to ban the Church. “They have been choreographed by the SBU to stir up fear and animosity and further divide a country at war, and must be condemned by international press freedom organizations,” he added.

Just what is being preached in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church that causes her to be viewed as such a tremendous national threat by the Zelensky government?  These words from a Lenten address by the head of the UOC, the Metropolitan Bishop Onuphry of Kiev, are representative:

In the sacred days of the Holy Forty Days, let us intensify our fervent prayers for peace to the God of peace (1 Thess. 5:23). May the fruits of our fasting be the increase of love, the cessation of hostility and bloodshed, the eradication of hatred and all malice, so that, having worthily passed through the ordeal of spiritual struggle, we may become dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom. 6:11).

Every year during the Holy Forty Days, we have taken special prayer rules upon ourselves. This year, the faithful of our Holy Church are blessed to make seven prostrations with the Jesus Prayer every day—for the forgiveness of our sins, and to read one chapter of the Holy Gospel—for peace in our land and throughout the world.

Not exactly the wild ravings of a warmongering pro-Russian lunatic.

Speaker Johnson has made no secret of his Christian faith.  It makes no sense for him to accede to give billions of dollars to prop up a government that is actively persecuting Orthodox Christians, and that is threatening to take its persecution further.

Secondly, this business of giving money to the Ukraine as a loan is a ruse.  Senator Graham let the cat out of the bag:  ‘Graham emphasized any loan to Ukraine would be “waivable” and would not charge interest.’  Did you catch that?  A ‘waivable’ loan:  That isn’t a loan; it’s just another name for billions more in welfare to be poured into Kiev’s coffers.  Don’t get snookered by Washington’s word swaps.

Third, the idea of confiscating Russian property and using the proceeds of its sale to help the Ukraine may sound like a fine idea, but it is anything but that, as it threatens the integrity of property rights here in the [u]S.  It is essentially the expansion into the international domain of our own governments’ corrupt asset forfeiture programs:

With its origins in the British fight against piracy on the open seas, civil asset forfeiture is nothing new. During Prohibition, police officers often seized goods, cash and equipment from bootleggers in a similar manner as today. However, contemporary civil asset forfeiture begins right where you’d think that it would: The War on Drugs.

In 1986, as First Lady Nancy Reagan encouraged America’s youth to “Just Say No,” the Justice Department started the Asset Forfeiture Fund. This sparked a boom in civil asset forfeiture that’s now become self-reinforcing, as the criminalization of American life and asset forfeiture have continued to feed each other.

In sum, asset forfeiture creates a motivation to draft more laws by the legislature, while more laws create greater opportunities for seizure by law enforcement. This perverse incentive structure is having devastating consequences: In 2014 alone, law enforcement took more stuff from American citizens than burglars did.

The current state of civil asset forfeiture in the United States is one of almost naked tyranny.  . . .

To say that police departments are funding themselves with civil asset forfeiture is more true than you might think. Civil asset forfeiture has exploded since 1986 when total seizures were at $93.7 million. By 2005, this had passed the $1 billion mark. That was double the 2004 amount, $567 million. By 2010, this figure jumped to $2.5 billion with more than 15,000 forfeiture cases – 11,000 of which were civil, not criminal.

By 2014, this figure climbed to $4.5 billion, with $29 billion seized between 2001 and 2014. Between 1985 and 1991, federal forfeitures increased by 1,500 percent, an increase of over 26 times. The Justice Department’s forfeiture fund (that does not include customs forfeitures) ballooned from $27 million in 1985 to $644 million in 1991. By 1996, this fund grew to over $1 billion for the first time. By 2008, it had tripled again to $3.1 billion.

 . . . As if civil asset forfeiture wasn’t bad enough on its own, there is also a process allowing police organizations to circumvent the existing laws. It’s called equitable sharing and it’s a gold mine for both the federal government and police departments. This process further incentivizes civil asset forfeiture as a means of funding police departments at the federal, state and local levels.

Here’s how it works: state and local law enforcement turn assets over to federal authorities for federal crimes. The feds then return up to 80 percent of the assets back from whence it came. This effectively allows state and local authorities to circumvent relevant local laws by bringing in the feds. For example, in Missouri, seized money is supposed to go to the schools. When equitable sharing is used, nothing goes to schools.

From 2000 to 2013, equitable sharing payments to states tripled from $198 million to $643 million. Only $3 million of this was actually seized in cooperation with federal authorities. Between 2008 and 2015, $5.3 billion was seized through equitable sharing. Where the burden of proof is higher, equitable sharing payouts increase. In 2009, the federal government paid out $500 million in assets under “equitable sharing” schemes. This is up 75 percent from the previous year.

Giving the go-ahead to seize Russia’s sovereign assets only reinforces this lawless practice of the various levels of government here in the [u]S of trampling on property rights.  It ought to be rejected out-of-hand, but these are the same kinds of folks, after all, who want to crush property rights for the sake of putting up 5G towers hither and yon and running carbon capture pipelines wherever they please.

Property rights are ancient – they have been part of the English common law that the States inherited for hundreds of years.  Instead of finding new ways to undermine them, the States and the feds should be considering ways to strengthen them.

Fourth, the longstanding problems of [u]S debt and inflation, and our own broken, largely undefended border would remain unaddressed.

Yet, if Speaker Johnson thinks it expedient to pass a Ukraine war spending bill, at the very least he should make it necessary that Senator Vance’s Ukraine Aid Transparency Act be passed along with it:

How much money has the United States actually spent supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia? It is quite possibly the most basic and pressing question surrounding America’s continued involvement in the war; yet the Biden administration continues to be cagey with the answer. Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio hopes to fix that through a new piece of legislation that will be introduced on Monday afternoon.

The bill, named the Ukraine Aid Transparency Act of 2024, seeks to demystify the current and future cost of Ukraine aid to the American taxpayer by changing reporting requirements in the fiscal year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) passed in December 2023. While the FY24 NDAA required a report from the administration on U.S. assistance to Ukraine, its language would have allowed the administration to leave out key pieces of information. Not only would the legislation compel the Biden administration into providing Congress with a real dollar value of Ukraine aid—which could currently be undervalued to the tune of billions of dollars—it would reveal how much aid the U.S. has given to other nations in the pursuit of supporting Ukraine while juxtaposing America’s price tag to that of our allies.

This whole Ukraine war funding fiasco is simply more proof that the peoples of the States matter to The Powers That Be only insofar as they are ‘human resources’ to fuel the grotesque military-industrial-Big Pharma-Big Tech-Big Ag complex.  Folks associated with the latter are the ones profiting from this war, not plain folks in Minnesota, Arizona, Georgia, etc., or in the Ukraine:

With regard to agriculture, since 2021 the US corporations Cargill, Dupont and Monsanto have bought up a third (16.7 million hectares) of Ukrainian agricultural land – Kyiv had a total of 40 million hectares. In addition, the beneficiaries of Ukraine’s agricultural sector include companies such as NCH Capital (USA), AgroGeneration (France); ADM Germany, KWS, Bayer and BASF (Germany) and even the Saudi Agricultural and Livestock Investment Company (SALIC) from Saudi Arabia. Under these circumstances, the signing of a tax convention and the negotiation of an investment agreement between Japan and Ukraine allow Japanese companies to participate in the division of Ukrainian agriculture.

Respect for the image of God in those lower class folks (or in other peoples around the world) simply doesn’t seem to exist in our political elite.  With that in mind, we all need to make sure we have solid connections with our neighbors and with our State and local government officials to help us through the years ahead, as the federal government is currently not so kindly inclined towards anyone but their insider clique – something that is not likely to change overnight (and perhaps not ever, at least in its current form).

May God grant to all Southerners enough discernment to understand that Mike Johnson, Donald Trump, RFK Jr, or any other person or institution linked with the federal government in DC (or aspiring to it) is not their savior.  ‘One is Holy, One is Lord, Jesus Christ, to the glory of God the Father’ (Hymn from the Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom).

-By Walt Garlington