To the rest of the world, Russia’s invasion is a nightmare. For Democrats, it was an opportunity. The party of “never let a crisis go to waste” needed an excuse to ram through its radical government spending bill — and the Ukrainians’ suffering gave them just the opening they’d been waiting for. Unfortunately for Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), exploiting a global catastrophe has its downsides. And in this case, it might mean Democrats are more divided — and more unpopular — than ever.

It started as a push for Ukrainian aid and ended as one of the most expensive progressive grab bags in recent memory. In Congress, it had been a while since the House decided to get down to the business of budgeting. The last time the chambers had passed a full appropriations package was 2020. But with Washington set to run out of money this Friday and the pressure to send dollars to Kyiv, Democrats saw a window for their priorities and took it. Desperate to get out of town to their party’s retreat, they dropped the text of the 2,700-page monstrosity on everyone’s desks at 2:30 a.m. Wednesday morning and had the audacity to schedule a vote that same day.

Republicans, who only had a handful of hours to study the language, were furious. “After taking a look at the bill, it’s pretty easy to understand why this garbage was released at the break of dawn,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) fumed. “It funds tyranny.” He ticked off a laundry list of wokeism that taxpayers would be on the hook for — everything from “transgender services” and “global climate activism” to “democracy programs in Venezuela.” “This bill doesn’t do a THING to open up American oil and gas production,” Roy vented. “It does give $14.1 billion dollars to Biden’s Department of Interior, which hasn’t conducted A SINGLE onshore federal oil and gas lease sale this year.”

Elsewhere, the Hill warns, it’s packed with pork — more than 4,000 earmarks for pricy pet projects that have nothing to do with running the government. The IRS would get an extra $12.6 billion (presumably to continue its targeting of conservatives), and, as Heritage Foundation points out, the proposal “doubles down on the Green New Deal-style subsidies.”

Democrats also didn’t waste a chance to force their transgender orthodoxy on an unwilling America. As FRC warned, extremists even managed to tack on their controversial Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which, as our Vice President for Policy and Government Affairs Travis Weber argued, should be called the Violence on Women Act, since it subjects battered women to the possibility of even more abuse in shelters and other private spaces where biological men would now be allowed.

There’s also the push to turn a project designed to help global women succeed financially into a “Gender Equity and Equality Action Fund,” Weber warns. “This new program, backed by previous commitments by the Biden administration to promote gender ideology around the world, will open the door wide for the administration to push a harmful ideology in places like Eastern Europe at a time when security should be the focus.” Worse, it paves the way for the international abortion industry to promote abortion as a means of “women’s empowerment.”

All in all, it’s an extreme wish list of radical social programs that Democrats jammed into what was supposed to be an emergency funding package for Ukraine. But not everyone in Pelosi’s party is happy. They lost the battle for more COVID relief, which sparked a huge internal feud that left liberals “angry and upset.” At the last minute, Pelosi’s team was also forced to divide the bill into two votes — putting all of the domestic spending on one side and the Defense and Ukrainian aid on the other. (Not surprisingly, the legitimate funding passed with 101 more votes than the Leftist handout.)

Making things even more interesting, Pelosi’s party was desperately trying to speed up the process so it could get members on the buses for their Philadelphia retreat. And now that the schedule for the event was leaked, we know why: Rep. Sean Maloney (D-N.Y.), the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), had arranged for a special drag queen show to kick things off, featuring a performer named Lady Bunny.

Instead, the line of coaches waited outside House office buildings while irate members on both sides fought Democratic leaders over everything from the price tag to the short timetable and the non-Ukraine waste crammed inside. Pelosi’s rank and file were so bitter by the end of the votes at 10 p.m. that Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wisc.) huffed to reporters that “This retreat is cursed.” Let’s hope the Left’s bill of woke priorities, which heads to the Senate next, is too.

You can help. Contact your senators and tell them to vote no on the Democrats’ social spending bill.

Originally published here.

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A World of Help for Ukraine

The first thing mothers feel when they get off the train at the Polish line is relief. The second is shock, followed by a rush of emotion and gratitude. There, at the Przemysl station, are lines of empty strollers and car seats free for the Ukrainian refugees. Displaced families walk the rows of cardboard boxes filled with toys and stuffed animals, try on winter coats from the mounds of donations, and rummage through diapers and other necessities. It’s the locals’ way of saying: let us help.

Most of the Ukrainians arrive only with what they could carry — others with even less. Volunteers at the station told CNN that the amount of donations from the Polish people was “overwhelming” and spread mainly by word of mouth. In Romania, Slovakia, and Hungary, relief groups race to meet growing demands for food, shelter, and medicine. Inside Ukraine, the situation is more dire. President Volodymyr Zelensky has been working around the clock to secure humanitarian corridors for his people, saying his heart “breaks” at what the Russians want to do to those who “need urgent help.”

Chuck Holton, a freelance reporter for CBN, told listeners on “Washington Watch,” that he was near the front lines this week and still saw people trying to flee. Even without a true ceasefire, he watched several families come out on foot and cross a broken down bridge, pointing out that many of them are “wounded or sick, aged and elderly… And the Russians opened fire on those people [Wednesday] afternoon and killed two, wound[ing] several others in that renewed fighting.”

Back at the capital, Holton estimates that 95 percent of the people have left Kyiv. “So when you look out the window today, the sun was out. There are elderly people out walking their dogs. There are soldiers, and that’s about the only two types of people that you see right now. But the grocery stores, some of them are open. There are smaller lines in the gas stations, so… life is going on here in Kyiv. And although we hear those air raid sirens on a daily basis, sometimes an hourly basis, really, all [the Russians] can put in here is long-range rockets from the far extent of their range, which makes them far less accurate. And that’s one of the reasons why civilian areas are being hit so often.”

Like most people, he thought the Russians would take Kyiv in the first 48 hours. Now, more than two weeks later, Holton says there are “no Russian troops within 25 kilometers” of the capital. The only way he believes Vladimir Putin could take the city is to flatten it. “It will take either a political solution, or they will actually have to destroy the city completely because there are massive blockades on every road. There are checkpoints, there are bunkers — everything is fortified. The people here have had a lot of time to dig in, and they’re ready. It would be like the siege of Stalingrad if the Russians actually think they’re going to take this city by force.”

Some of the locals who can’t fight are spending their time driving back and forth between the Polish border, bringing medicine and aid for the babies and elderly. Others are “making Molotov cocktails, sewing camouflage nets for barricades, distributing food, hot drinks, and cigarettes to those standing guard. They are raising money for the military, building more roadblocks, and even painting over traffic signs in an attempt to confuse invading forces.”

They’re also preparing for widespread outages — phone, internet, heat, and electricity — by setting up networks of neighbors to help each other inside Kyiv’s borders. “You don’t see fear in their eyes,” Holton agrees, but the stakes are high. Eric Patterson, executive vice president of the Religious Freedom Institute, worries what Putin could do to the people of faith if he succeeds. “Russia has a uniquely hostile view towards religious minorities in the country when it comes to Ukraine,” he explained on “Washington Watch.” “Yes, this is a concern in a variety of ways. One is simply that we’ve seen attacks, bombs dropped, churches destroyed in eastern parts of Ukraine already. But over time, what we’ve seen is that if Russia exerts control in an area, it starts to squeeze out those religious minorities because it doesn’t see them as having full allegiance to Moscow. And that’s a problem…”

For now, the focus is on getting Ukrainians the help they need now. “I’m just getting inundated by people in the states who want to come over and do something… And what I’m telling them is go to Poland, go to some of these European countries, because there are literally millions of Ukrainians there now who had to pick up and leave at a moment’s notice and don’t have anything to rely on over there, except the generosity of the people in those countries. So there’s so much need out there right now, and that’s where you can be the most help.” If you can’t go, give to an organization on the ground like Samaritan’s Purse, CBN’s Operation Blessing, or others.

Above all, pray — for the Ukrainians, for our leaders, and for a peaceful resolution to this devastating conflict.

Originally published here.

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This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.