Editorial: The Senate fails Afghans and US service members

Let’s get right to the point: If and when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Chuck Grassley ever again try to prop up their bona fides as supporters of U.S. troops and our allies abroad, they should be laughed out of the room.

Last week, the two GOP senators defied a coalition including various lawmakers in their own party and hundreds of military veterans — from enlisted service members to high-ranking officers — by opposing the inclusion of the Afghan Adjustment Act in the $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill that was just approved, dooming it to be left out.

These scoundrels will try to weasel their way out of criticism by cynically invoking a supposed threat to national security, as if what they’ve done weren’t a threat ten thousand times greater. What that is is preventing tens of thousands of Afghan evacuees who’ve been paroled into the United States, largely during our botched withdrawal, from obtaining permanent status and keep them at risk of deportation.

Included are Afghan service members who quite literally saved American troops’ lives, as well as all manner of support staff in both military and civilian roles large and small who kept the entire U.S. operation chugging along. Some of them may be eligible for Special Immigrant Visas, but many aren’t, and it’s not that only the Afghans directly involved in the war effort deserve protections. Plenty of the arrivals are regular families who saw the Taliban closing in and decided to seek a better future. Now, we are threatening to steal away that future and toss them to the wolves.

Under the act, residency isn’t handed out willy-nilly; applicants would go through the same adjustment process that hundreds of thousands of people already use every year, and will be some of the most heavily vetted people on Earth. Turning our backs regardless sends a pretty clear international message that the U.S. will quickly forget even those who directly assisted us at great personal peril. How’s that for national security?