Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) told Breitbart News on Friday that some of his Republican colleagues are too willing to support Democrat funding priorities in exchange for “national defense” spending.
“They would give any amount of money to the Democrats if they give us what we want for national defense,” Marshall said on the Breitbart News Daily podcast with host Alex Marlow, referring to some Republicans supporting the $1.7 trillion omnibus bill, which the U.S. House of Representatives passed Friday. Nine House Republicans voted in support of the legislation.
He added, “So in this budget, there’s $850 billion dollars for national defense. That’s a ten-percent hike from last year, so that’s where they start off bargaining and saying, ‘Look, if you give us whatever we want for defense, we’ll give you whatever you want for social programs.’ Six people get together in the dark room, and they put the deal together.”
Marlow asked Marshall if the senator had “confidence” that tens of billions of dollars that the federal government ostensibly slated as “aid” for Ukraine were properly accounted for.
“I do not have confidence in that,” Marshall replied. “Whenever you are showing up this much aid that one time, there’s bound to be fraud, and we saw this with the Paycheck Protection Program. We saw it with unemployment insurance. Why would this be any different?”
He continued, “We’ve already given Ukraine $50 billion of aid, more than the rest of the world combined. We have over a hundred thousand American soldiers on the NATO frontlines. The rest of the world doesn’t have half that many, and Joe Biden still has not maximized sanctions. I think he hasn’t applied 50 percent of the sanctions that he could.”
U.S. President Joe Biden (R) welcomes President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky to the White House on December 21, 2022, in Washington, DC (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images).
The White House’s conduct towards the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Marshall remarked, had the appearance of deliberate extension.
He stated, “If you didn’t know better, you would think Joe Biden wants this war to drag on. … They’re just kind of basically slow-bleeding this war to keep it going along.”
Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.
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