Renee Parsons

Not unlike House Speaker Mike Johnson who recently surrendered the House, Rep. Mike McCaul, Chair of the prestigious Foreign Affairs Committee also believes and repeats the intel assertions of Russian vulnerability and its malevolent intent of marching through Europe, as if heard directly from the right hand of God.

And yet there are House members like Rep. MJT who dare question the intel agencies with a history of prevarication as they continually spin the web that Russia has a nefarious alternative agenda.  That merely protecting its own border with Ukraine from a NATO incursion is a prelude to a sovereignty threat leading to WW III is little more than a figment of Vladimir Putin’s imagination.

It is no secret that the 118th Session of Congress has materialized as the most contentious House gathering since any one can remember ….revealing the shocking verification of Congressional corruption that has been the number of lopsided Uniparty votes favoring a dissolution of the fabled two-party system.

Those votes occurred when a majority of old-guard thinking Republicans threw their votes to the Democrats on substantive legislative bills like funding the Ukraine war or Israel’s continued groveling for US taxpayer subsidy.

While the 2022 election provided a scant GOP margin in the House, twenty Trump America First stalwarts rocked the boat to challenge the Speakership  of Rep. Kevin McCarthy.   Given a $33 Trillion debt, those twenty continued to hang-in as other Republicans joined the struggle to amend how the annual budget is rolled into one massive Omnibus with thousands of pages of details submerged deep within its bowels or fast-tracked into a stimulus package or budget supplemental – all with no opportunity for debate or serious question.

The obvious alternative of single subject funding proposals which would have provided an opportunity for the American people to understand how taxpayer funds were being exploited is too administratively prohibitive to be a viable option.

Upgrading House floor procedures to enable the free flow of legislative debate would be a step in the right direction as enacted by the historic Rules Committee if it would loosen its reins to ‘control’ and/or limit impending legislation to fit Republican leadership narrative.

As HR 8034 et al encompassing a national security supplemental worth $95 Billion was proposed, the entire fraudulent charade of an accelerated yet skillfully coordinated fiscal approval process is aimed maintaining its campaign donors while frustrating any attempt to make the Congress more responsive to the American public.

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It should come as no surprise that as Chair of Foreign Affairs, Rep. Mike McCaul (Texas) assumed an active leadership role in passage of the entire supplemental as well as major House sponsor of AIPAC’s favored HR 8038 known as “Peace through Strength Act.”   HR 8038 included “seizing’ Russia’s $300 billion securities, an unconstitutional ban of TikTok and increased sanctions against Iran, Syria, China, Hamas  and Palestine resistance groups.

Putin aide Dmitry Pesko has promised a ‘complex’ legal fight and retaliatory action to restore the ‘seized’ securities and predicts severe damage to the US economy.  Who would have thought otherwise?  Chrisine LeGarde, President of the Europea Central Bank suggested the use of profits from Russian assets could  violate the international legal order.

In 2021, as ranking member on Foreign Affairs McCaul applauded the Biden Administration’s attack on Iran forces in Syria as retaliation for an attack on American forces.  Americans have been in Syria for the last decade protecting US ‘procurement’ of Syrian oil despite being uninvited and requested by President Assad to leave the country.

As the GOP took control of the House with the 2022 election, McCaul became Chair of the prestigious Foreign Affairs Committee. By February, 2023 he led his first delegation to Kiev urging the US to provide long range surface to surface ATACMS to Ukraine which would enable strikes within Russian territory.

Once McCaul moved into GOP leadership role,his campaign fundraising saw contributions from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) increase an incredible 1,413% during the 2024 election cycle when compared to the 2022 cycle.  Open Secrets listed the “pro-Israel industry,” including AIPAC, as having contributed $372,468 to McCaul’s campaign overall in 2024, a 681% increase from the $47,673 in contributions he received from the “pro-Israel industry” in 2022.

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On the other side of the same GOP aisle, stands Rep. Marjorie T. Greene (MJT) who insists that if intel has the ‘proof’ that Putin is planning to march on Poland and push forward for war in Europe,

Greene suggested a simple solution:

“If the American people are going to have to pay for it, then show us this proof that was shown to Mike Johnson in the SCIF [sensitive compartment information facility],” Greene said. “Why is this classified information? If this is a real threat to all of Europe, if this is a threat to America and our national securiy, then roll out the presentation.”

As the Financial Times has suggested that the $60 Billion is not sufficient to ‘dramatically alter Kiev’s position on the front lines”, Greene asserts that neither Speaker Johnson nor Rep. McCaul ever received such a classified briefing.

Since neither the Speaker nor McCaul has claimed any  such an authoritative classified briefing ever occurred, how is it that the majority of GOP House voted by a 112-101 margin on Saturday to send an additional $60  billion to Ukraine?   The only conclusion is that the Republican House is as divided as McCaul and Greene – with only one side daring to acknowledge its flawed leadership.