WASHINGTON — As the House of Representatives began debating Wednesday whether to impeach President Trump for undercutting Ukraine in its fight with Russian aggressors, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee met in a small room in the Capitol to consider a bill that has been bubbling along all year with bipartisan support: S. 482, the “Defending American Security from Kremlin Aggression Act of 2019.”
The bill’s lead author is Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who introduced it in February, long before he became the Senate’s leading defender of Mr. Trump, and long before Mr. Trump decided to undercut his own administration’s policy.
Today, the bill looks like it is preserved in legislative amber, an artifact from a different age — 10 months ago — when one of the few topics on which Republicans and Democrats agreed was that if the United States did not push back hard against President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia, no one else would.
The debate that resonated inside the ornate Senate Foreign Relations Committee suite — where senators of a different era debated how to push back against Hitler in the 1930s and how to define Cold War strategy against the Soviet Union thereafter — made clear that members would vote for any bill that calls for punishing Moscow, or containing its power.
They simply will not remove Mr. Trump for undercutting that punishment — and his own administration’s stated policy.
“This was something everyone was for, until they weren’t,’’ Senator Angus King, independent of Maine, said this week. He mused on how the country came to this moment because of the president’s decision to trade an issue of huge geopolitical gravity — Ukraine’s security, and thus the United States’ — for a “domestic political errand,’’ as Mr. Trump’s own former top Russia adviser, Fiona Hill, put it so searingly in testimony last month.
But that is only the beginning of the contradictions in American foreign policy unearthed in the impeachment inquiry.
At Wednesday morning’s Senate hearing, Democrats and Republicans outdid each other in professing their devotion to standing up to Mr. Putin. Mr. Graham termed Russia an “evil enemy” comparable to fighting “the Nazis and the Japanese” in World War II — a bit of exaggeration about the current level of conflict, perhaps, but symbolic of the mood on Capitol Hill.
“The president is not a Russian agent,’’ Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, declared, in the first and last mention of Mr. Trump during the hearing. He went on to say that while he had doubts about some parts of the legislation, he would vote for it, because he had to fight “information warfare,’’ and that Republicans had to remember “Vladimir Putin will do to us what he has done to everyone else.”
After some arguments about whether the new sanctions might harm American companies — the chief concern of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and petroleum industry lobbyists, who argued for watering it down — the bill passed, 17 to 5. A vote in the full Senate would not come until next year, presumably after an impeachment trial.
But the juxtaposition of the unified denunciation of Russia and the divisions over how to deal with a president who was undercutting the pushback against Moscow was striking.
In the end, this impeachment is the first over a question of whether the president is selling out American national security. While Ukraine is the proximate event, how the president has dealt with Mr. Putin is the overarching theme.
One of Mr. Trump’s top advisers argued the other day that the first article of impeachment was flawed because Mr. Trump was not guilty of withholding “vital military and security assistance to Ukraine to oppose Russian aggression.’’ Citing a major pillar of the Republicans’ defense of Mr. Trump, this adviser noted that the $391 million in military aid eventually was released, and the Ukrainian military now has Javelin anti-tank missiles to take on Russia’s ground forces. He argued that Mr. Trump has done more to support the Ukrainian government than President Barack Obama ever did.
That ignores the reality that one lesson of the impeachment process is that American allies are on notice that the United States’ protection is up for sale.
And that the price includes helping a president get re-elected.