The Senate passed the Ukraine aid bill in the early morning hours of February 13, following a rare all-night Senate session, which also includes aid to Israel, Gaza, and Taiwan, by an overwhelming 70-29 vote.

It is almost certainly dead in the House of Representatives.

How can this be? How can the U.S. back away from this commitments? Well, the new, Trumpist Republican party would rather lose Ukraine than lose an election.

The first sign of this new pathology came in October 2009, when conservatives openly gloated about rejection of the US bid to host the 2016 Olympic games. “The ego has landed!” celebrated one conservative web site. The reason? If winning helps Obama, we want America to lose.

This kind of “thinking” would have been unthinkable 30 years ago. Now, it’s orthodoxy in one of America’s two parties.

To understand the aid bill, you need to understand the invented “border crisis.” Republicans have managed to “rebrand” immigrants with the absurd image of an invasion of rapists, criminals, drug smugglers, and child traffickers. Their hard line on immigration –their claim that the southern border is the real national security crisis– resulted in a demand to link all that foreign-aid funding with “securing the border.” “The southern border” is that urgent.

As a result, Senate negotiators agreed to a bill that largely reflected Republican priorities. It increases funds for border protection, narrows asylum rules, makes it easier to deport, all Republican priorities, with no mention of traditional Democratic issues such as “a path to citizenship” or DACA.

Some of the most conservative Republican senators advised their House colleagues that this is the best bill that can ever be approved and that the chance to pass it is highly perishable. One called it a “once in a generation opportunity.”

But, rather than passing the bill in the Senate, the people who invented this crisis turned around and killed the whole package. Why? Because Donald Trump would rather have chaos than solve the problem.

So, we have one party that claims we’re being invaded by the world’s scum, that our children are being killed by the fentanyl they bring in, they’re raping our wives and daughters, bringing crime and disease to every town in the USA. “Poisoning the blood” and “destroying the fabric” of the country. But come to think of it, I’d rather have these rapists and fentanyl smugglers invade your neighborhood because I think that will make you vote for me.

Facing all this opposition, the Senate approved a slimmed down bill, with just the aid, in the early morning hours of February 13th. But House Speaker Mike Johnson immediately signaled that he probably would not allow a vote in the House. Why? Because it doesn’t address the border. In a month, we’ve come full circle. The same group that insisted on addressing the border in this legislation, then proceeded to kill the legislation addressing the border, now use the lack of border legislation as the reason to oppose Ukraine aid.