Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) on Sunday asked House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) for a $95 billion foreign aid package that includes: He pointed to the death of his Jewish ancestors during the World Wars. Aid to Ukraine, on the floor of the House of Representatives.
Speaking at a news conference from New York, Schumer advocated an “isolationist” approach to global conflicts and the death and destruction caused by Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler in World War II.
“We have isolationists in the House, people on the far right. They said, ‘This is far away, we don’t need to bother,'” Schumer said Sunday. “That’s what the world said about Hitler in 1938, but America paid the price in hundreds of thousands of deaths and billions of dollars in expenditures. That’s what people said here in the United States in 1916. , followed by a long World War that took a toll on us and led to World War II. So these isolationists haven’t learned the lessons of history.”
Schumer then told a personal anecdote about his ancestors. Choltkiv, Galicia — A city in western Ukraine where several groups of Jews lived before the Holocaust.
“In 1941, the Nazis came and told my grandmother, who was well-known in the town of Chortkiv, to gather her family on the balcony. Thirty-five members, ranging in age from eighties to three months old, gathered. Please come with me, too.” She said, “We won’t move,” and machine-gunned them all. This is what happens when you try to appease a dictator. You can’t. Mr. Johnson must learn that lesson,” Mr. Schumer said Sunday.
Schumer’s indirect call to stand up to Russian President Vladimir Putin comes on the heels of a trip to Ukraine last week, where he and a parliamentary delegation met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
New York Democrats have repeatedly urged Johnson in recent weeks to send the $95 emergency defense spending bill passed by the Senate earlier this month to the House.
The bill includes about $60 billion in aid for Ukraine’s war against Russia, as well as funding for Israel’s war against Hamas, humanitarian aid in Gaza, and the United States’ Indo-Pacific allies.
The bill lacks border security measures sought by House Republicans and has heightened uncertainty in the House of Commons after Prime Minister Johnson signaled he would not table it.
The Senate bill is an attempt to get foreign aid through Congress after a bipartisan border security agreement that would have allowed aid to Kyiv collapsed earlier this month over Republican opposition.
“The Senate stood in support of Ukraine, with strong bipartisan Democratic and Republican support of more than 70 votes,” Schumer said. “If Mr. Johnson puts this bill on the floor, it will pass, but he is very afraid of the radical right wing, the hard right wing, in his caucus, and there are only about 20 to 30 people in his caucus, so he won’t be able to pass it. It has not been transferred to
Congress has not been able to pass an aid bill for Eastern European countries for nearly a year due to growing divisions among members. The last time funding for Ukraine passed Congress was in late 2022, when the Democratic majority passed the Fourth Policy for the Nation.
The Hill has reached out to Johnson’s office for comment.
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