Hi, everyone. Welcome to Positively Dreadful with me, your host, Brian Boiler. A quick spoiler,

we're going to mark the coming anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine on this week's

episode. But we've actually been talking about doing this exact episode on this topic since

about the fall of last year. We kept almost recording it in January before finally deciding

to wait until now. So what was so special about the fall in January? Well, in the fall,

we were anticipating a high likelihood that Republicans would capture control of the

House of Representatives, maybe the Senate as well. And in looking ahead to the many ways

that would change US policy and political discourse, we realized that it would represent a meaningful

breach in the US government's otherwise unified support for Ukraine. A small one, maybe, but a real

one. And I don't really think we were alone in that assessment. I think it was a big part of the

reason Congress was able to pass a real appropriations bill to fund the government last year. You may have

heard it called the Omnibus or the $1.7 trillion spending bill. That bill passed with a filibuster

proof bipartisan majority in the Senate in defiance of public pleading from then house minority

leader Kevin McCarthy to hold off and to let the incoming House Republican majority take a whack at

the bill. But the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, is for now at least highly supportive

of US aid to Ukraine. And McConnell knew that punting the Omnibus into January or February

would mean giving McCarthy and the Republican Party's pro-Russia faction, which currently holds a

lot of sway in the House GOP conference, an early crack at the Ukraine aid budget.

So McConnell went over McCarthy's head. And instead of chipping away at US support for Ukraine,

Congress actually locked in tens of billions of dollars for weapons, troop supplies, and financial

support for the Ukrainian government. Then in January, after putting him through a day's long

humiliation ritual, Republicans elected McCarthy speaker in a way that made it clear that the people

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