Nobody Knows Anything

Nobody knows anything. The line is William Goldman’s, about Hollywood, and it fits every analysis published since Tuesday night about what a Democratic Congress means for Ukraine. The takes are confident. They should not be.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. What we know: Democrats hold the Senate by four seats and the House by 20. New chairs, new gatekeepers, a new calendar. That decides whether a bill reaches the floor. What we don’t know: Foreign policy is still run from the White House, with Congress supplying oversight. Lame-duck presidents have a habit of turning to foreign affairs – Clinton at Camp David, Obama’s pivot to Asia, Bush’s surge – but a habit is not a forecast. Nobody yet knows whether this majority plans to legislate or to hold hearings. Those are different worlds for Ukraine, and Ukraine will be a small part of either. That is the headline story. The other one matters more. The bench is gone. Eight House members who carried Ukraine legislation are not returning in January. Michael McCaul (R-TX), who sponsored the Russia sanctions bill and chaired Foreign Affairs. Don Bacon (R-NE), a retired Air Force brigadier general. Steve Cohen (D-TN), co-chair of the Ukraine Caucus. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), who whipped the sanctions vote. Nancy Pelosi. Seth Moulton. Lloyd Doggett. Chuck Edwards resigned. The Senate is worse. Lindsey Graham died in July and the seat was lost in November. Mitch McConnell, who held Senate Republicans together on every Ukraine vote, retired. So did Joni Ernst, whose seat flipped; Jeanne Shaheen, ranking member on Foreign Relations; Dick Durbin, Ukraine Caucus co-chair; and Gary Peters. Thom Tillis declined to run rather than face a primary. Markwayne Mullin, who brokered the Supplemental, had already left for the DHS. Other Topics of Interest Trump: You’re Fired Unfortunately, Democrats did not win a veto-proof majority, and the president can veto anything they pass. The primaries cut both ways. Republicans lost Bill Cassidy and John Cornyn to challengers with worse records or none. Democrats lost Dan Goldman, Adriano Espaillat, and Diana DeGette to candidates who campaigned on cutting the US military. Jared Golden, a key sanctions vote, did not run. The Ukraine Caucus lost 25 of its 82 House members and seven of its 27 Senators. Its House co-chair, Brian Fitzpatrick, was defeated. Fitzpatrick was a hero for Ukraine – a hand in every significant bill since 2022, and the swing votes inside the Republican conference. Mike Turner, who chaired House Intelligence, lost as well. The consolation prize is not one. Ukraine’s loudest critics are also leaving. Thomas Massie lost his primary to a retired Navy SEAL. Andy Biggs, Tommy Tuberville, and Nancy Mace left to run for governor. Victoria Spartz was defeated with Lauren Boebert trailing. I am glad to see them go, but be honest about what it buys. Policy is not made on Twitter. Not one of them passed a bill on Ukraine or anything else. Removing a critic who never wrote legislation is not the same as replacing a champion who did. And Anna Paulina Luna, the most vocally pro-Russian member of the House, held her seat by a point. Who arrives. Eighteen new Senators take office in January. Six are state legislators with no military service and no time in the House. Five have no legislative experience at all. One has served in uniform. Ukraine was not an issue in any of their races. Eight new House Democrats beat pro-Ukraine incumbents from the left. With one exception, none flipped a Republican seat – they defeated mainstream Democrats in Democratic districts. In the Senate, Abdul El-Sayed and Peggy Flanagan replaced two members who voted for the sanctions bill. The encouraging number is that out of the 108 new House members, 18 are veterans – a retired vice admiral, a rear admiral, a Navy SEAL captain, an Army major with six deployments, and a combat trauma surgeon. Too early to call it a bloc, but worth watching. What was actually scarce. The Graham Act did not pass because someone whipped votes at the end. It passed because Lindsey Graham knew how to build a bill that could survive both chambers and the White House. Not a perfect bill. Better than nothing, and nothing was the alternative. Votes were never the scarce resource for Ukraine in Washington. Expertise was. The people who knew how to draft a provision, walk it through committee, and keep it alive through conference – that is the group this election thinned out. The work that decides a bill happens in a committee room months before the floor vote. Who to watch. In the Senate, Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Dave McCormick (R-PA). Blumenthal did real work on the sanctions bill and has been to Ukraine repeatedly; McCormick has the PEACE Act. Behind them, Jack Reed at Armed Services, Chris Coons at Defense Appropriations, and Roger Wicker, Jim Risch, and Tom Cotton as ranking members. In the House, Gregory Meeks takes Foreign Affairs and Adam Smith takes Armed Services. French Hill at Financial Services handles sanctions and frozen assets. Watch one seat above the others: Senate Foreign Relations, with Shaheen retiring. That chair sets the Ukraine agenda for two years. And mark March 18 – Treasury’s reporting deadline on sanctions implementation. Passing a sanctions law and enforcing one are different projects. One bill. My prediction: Ukraine gets one bill through this session. Last session 15 were before Congress, each cannibalizing the others until Graham got his through. Any bill needs bipartisan support and a signature from the White House. So the choice is weapons and sanctions, or immigration. American advocacy groups are pushing to convert Temporary Protected Status into permanent residence and citizenship for Ukrainians already in the US, and to reopen the programs that brought them. The need behind that is real and I do not dismiss it. But immigration splinters support in both parties. Democrats will vote for immigration relief instead of weapons and consider the debt paid. Republicans who backed the sanctions bill will not follow us there, and we lose them on the one thing they were willing to give. There is room for a single bill. Spent on the wrong one, the year is gone. My family is being bombed in Ukraine and has been fighting for four years. I have spent 30 years in the country. I am not writing this from a distance, and I am not neutral about where that one bill goes. Here is the part that concerns readers in Kyiv rather than in Washington. Ukraine’s access in the US was never the embassy alone. It was a few dozen members of Congress who knew the file well enough to write it, argue it in committee, and keep it alive. Most of them are now gone. The offices replacing them are not hostile – they are blank. They have no record on Ukraine because nobody has asked them for one yet, and a new member decides early whom to listen to. That work starts in January, and whoever reaches those offices first writes on the empty page. Ukraine’s own people should be in those rooms well before March. So should every Ukrainian with a cousin, a classmate, or a colleague in an American district – one call from a constituent still outweighs a cable. And do not read Tuesday as a verdict on Ukraine. Ukraine was not on the ballot in a single one of these races. It was not the reason anyone won or lost. The result is not a message from the American people about us, and treating it as one will lead to the wrong conclusions in both directions. I opened by saying that nobody knows anything, and I meant it – about the new majority, about the White House, about what this Congress will actually do within two years. I do not know which bill will pass Congress. I know which one would help Ukraine win the war. Jed Sunden is founder of the American Ukraine Committee and the founder of the Kyiv Post. The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.