Freedom Caucus defends decision to redirect Ukraine funding to Senate without border aid

House Freedom Caucus members are punching back at their Republican colleagues after being accused over the weekend of costing the GOP key policy wins on border security.

Certain Republicans blamed hard-liners’ tactics for allowing Ukraine aid to be approved in a bipartisan way in the House over the weekend without border concessions attached.

The House did have a separate border security bill, but it failed to make it out of the GOP-controlled Rules Committee last week. As a result, the border bill then fell short of the two-thirds threshold it would have needed to pass on the House floor under suspension of the rules. In contrast, the $95 billion foreign aid bill made it out of the Rules Committee with rare Democratic support after three GOP members opposed the effort and passed with a simple bipartisan majority on the House floor on Saturday.

“If you were a true conservative, you would actually advance border security, but what they want to do is they want to blow up border security,” Rep. Andy Barr (R-KY) told Axios.

A second member, who spoke with Axios anonymously, said the Freedom Caucus was turning lawmakers into the “most bipartisan Congress ever … because they are unwilling to compromise just a little bit in a divided government, they force us to make bigger concessions and deals with the Dems.”

But Freedom Caucus members, including Rules Committee Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), defended his tactics and his vote against Ukraine aid.

“With regard to Ukraine – there is no monolithic block of ‘anti-Ukraine’ aid – there are varying opinions, but informed by (in addition to America’s border first): 1) we have already spent most of $113BB on Ukraine, and only about $45BB of that went to ‘lethal aid,’ and this is for another $60BB, 2) There will almost certainly be future requests, including rebuilding,” Roy wrote in a post to X on Monday morning, adding that the United States has engaged in “endless borrowing” for conflicts and does not know what the end result of the financing will be.

Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC) said in a statement Saturday evening that leadership “never proposed to attach any border security measure” to the Ukraine bill but a “cosmetic vote to give cover that the Senate would have been free to ignore.”

Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH) on Sunday backed Bishop’s claim that the border proposal was never attached to the rules vote, which makes the rules vote failing irrelevant.

“Those who wanted to force a Senate vote on border security were betrayed by the surrender of leverage, not by opposition to the rule,” Davidson wrote in a post to X. “A substantial number of foreign aid supporters felt real border security policy changes (like HR2) would further delay foreign aid because the Senate would use it as an excuse not to bring up the House bill – which was sent back to the Senate as a literal amendment to the Senate foreign aid bill. The Speaker agreed with them.”

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) should have attached the border measures to the rule vote, which would have forced a clear vote on it, Davidson said.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), a former Freedom Caucus member, called the vote another “betrayal” by Johnson for the “bulls***” he pulled on the House floor Saturday but said she would not push a motion for him to vacate the speakership at this point in time.

“There’s some people that are, that are rash and irresponsible and do things like what happened last time? I’m not that person. I didn’t come here to Congress to, to actually hurt our institution, hurt our majority,” Greene told reporters outside the Capitol on Saturday. “I’m handling this the right way and so I’m allowing the process to happen. … Mike Johnson is a lame duck. He’s done.”