Majority Leader Schumer Floor Remarks On The Urgent Need To Provide National Security Aid

Washington, D.C. – Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) today spoke on the Senate floor on the urgent need to provide aid to Ukraine, Israel, the Indo-Pacific, and humanitarian assistance. Below are Senator Schumer’s remarks, which can also be viewed here:

The House is scheduled to take up the supplemental tomorrow. It would at last deliver critical aid for Ukraine, Israel, the Indo-Pacific, and humanitarian assistance. We will see how things go in the lower chamber over the next day or so, and I hope the House gets this legislation passed without further delay.

If the House sends us a supplemental package, the Senate will move expeditiously to send it to the President’s desk. And the President has said, if Congress passes the supplemental, he will sign it.

I hope the House gets it done very soon, because delay on this national security funding has cost America and cost our allies dearly. I met yesterday with the Ukrainian Prime Minister, who told me just how difficult the war has become for Ukrainian fighters who are now running out of ammo and air defenses and other basic needs. He told me that if America doesn’t stand with Ukraine, they will lose the war. Simple as that.  

In the few months that the House has sat on the supplemental funding, the war has clearly turned in Russia’s favor—their army has grown larger, their ammunition stores have expanded, and they enjoy support from nations like North Korea, Iran, China.

Putin has long bet that, sooner or later, American support for Ukraine will wane. He said months ago on Russian TV that “the free stuff” from America is eventually going to run out. We dare not prove him right, because if he sees that the United States will not stop him in Ukraine, he may well conclude we won’t stop him if he keeps going.

And on the other side of the world, the Chinese Communist Party may look at America’s abandonment of Ukraine and wonder if we will similarly show weakness in the Indo-Pacific. Imagine the kind of signal American inaction would send to our friends in Japan and in the Philippines. Imagine what it would say to the people of Taiwan. That is not a world we want to live in.

Protecting Democracy is not for the faint of heart. Sometimes it requires us to make difficult choices. But that is precisely what the American people sent us here to do. I hope we can finish the job very, very soon.

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