Senate Foreign Aid Bill Is Inflection Point for America First Movement

The Senate vote on the $95.3 billion foreign aid bill on February 13 – legislation which included $0 for border security – was the latest sign of an ideological shift within the Republican Party and the emergence of a burgeoning America First majority.

The final tally on the bill was 70-29, with 22 Republicans voting in favor of the legislation. The package allocates $60 billion to Ukraine, $14 billion to Israel, $4.8 billion to Taiwan, and $9.2 billion in miscellaneous “humanitarian assistance.”

This latest government handout to foreign countries comes amid the backdrop of the worst border crisis in American history. After Fiscal Year 2023 saw a record 3.2 million illegal border crossings, FY 2024 is on pace to shatter that record again.

House Republicans initially demanded that any more foreign assistance be paired with H.R. 2, their border security legislation that would represent a significant overhaul of immigration enforcement policy. But when a “bipartisan” group of senators offered only a Trojan Horse bill that purports to address illegal border crossings but would actually end up making the problem worse, the rest of the Senate Republican Caucus wisely killed it.

However, that win for conservatives was quickly undone by the vote on this most recent bill, which includes all the funding to protect the borders of foreign countries without even the pretext of protecting our own border.

As freshman Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt observed in a post on X, almost every Republican senator under the age of 55 voted “No” on the bill, a measure that Schmitt aptly described as “America Last.” Perhaps more notably, 15 of 17 Republican senators elected since 2018 also voted “No.”

This vote perhaps more than any other clearly shows the lasting effect that former President Donald Trump and his America First movement have had on the Republican Party. More than just parroting Trump’s “America First” slogan in public (as virtually every nominally Republican politician does in an attempt to piggyback off the former president’s popularity with the GOP base) the majority of Republican politicians elected since Trump’s ascension are now actually voting in line with that principle.

The two lone exceptions in this case were Senators Mitt Romney of Utah and Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, both elected in 2018. Romney, one of Trump’s top critics in the Senate who has announced that he is retiring at the end of his term this year, has since his ill-fated 2012 presidential run adhered to a neoconservative philosophy that embraces foreign interventionism. His alliance with Democrats to send even more U.S. taxpayer dollars overseas while his own country is being invaded is hardly surprising.

Cramer, a mostly reliable conservative, appears to be the odd man out. In a post on X responding to Schmitt, Cramer accuses his Missouri colleague of “youthful naivety,” writing, “Reagan may be dead, but his doctrine saved the world during less dangerous times than these. If the modern Marx (Putin for the youngsters) restores the USSR while we pretend it’s not our problem, God help us.”

Leaving aside the highly questionable idea that Vladimir Putin is a “modern Marx,” it is worth engaging for a moment with Cramer’s insinuation that Ronald Reagan would have favored sending $95 billion overseas while an urgent crisis festered at home. Would The Gipper really have advocated for such a move?

As freshman Republican Senator JD Vance of Ohio reminds us, not likely.

“Hysterically, look what the neocons wrote about Reagan in the 1980s,” Vance posted on X in response to Cramer. “They accused him of accommodating the Soviets instead of starting a war with them.”

“I like Kevin, but come on, man, have some self-awareness,” Vance continued. “The fruits of this generation in American leadership is [sic]: quagmire in Afghanistan, war in Iraq under false pretenses, declining life expectancy, and demographic collapse in the West. This moment calls out for many things, but boomer neoconservatism is not among them.”

As Vance, who was born just a few months before the 40th president won his landslide re-election in 1984, powerfully suggests, appealing to Reagan to justify voting with Democrats to pass gargantuan sums of foreign aid when the American people are begging for relief from an economic and border crisis at home is a losing proposition. The “Reagan Revolution” is remembered primarily for the great flourishing of the American economy and culture – for Reagan (and, for that matter, for Trump) a necessary prerequisite to advance American interests abroad.

The exchange between Schmitt, Cramer, and Vance effectively captures the ideological struggle taking place between the old guard of the Republican Party and the new breed of America First conservatives – a struggle which, as this back-and-forth shows, the America First faction is winning.

However, the old guard still wields significant power and influence, and is determined to ensure its vision for unending foreign interventionism wins out. As Vance also highlighted in a memo to GOP senators, the foreign aid bill has a hidden “kill switch” that would prevent Trump, if he retakes the White House this fall, from pausing or ending Ukraine funding – and pave the way for yet another impeachment effort if he does so.

“The supplemental represents an attempt by the foreign policy blob/deep state to stop President Trump from pursuing his desired policy, and if he does so anyways, to provide grounds to impeach him and undermine his administration. All Republicans should oppose its passage,” reads the memo. Still, however, 22 Republicans voted in favor of the bill.

Thankfully, House Speaker Mike Johnson has indicated that he has no intention of bringing the bill up for a vote. Despite a number of questionable votes and missteps, it seems the inertia of the Republican Party is finally moving in the direction of putting Americans first.

B.C. Brutus is the pen name of a writer with previous experience in the legislative and executive branches.