Former GOP Lawmakers Urge Speaker Johnson to Pass Ukraine Aid

Plus: The politics of the vice president's Planned Parenthood visit.

Hot off the presses this morning: As the Republican effort to impeach Joe Biden flounders in the House, the White House is moving in for the kill. “It is clear the House Republican impeachment effort is over,” White House Counsel Edward Siskel wrote in a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson released this morning:

Just this week, it has been reported that members of the House Majority believe the inquiry is “falling apart.” One House Republican leadership aide told a news outlet the Majority has uncovered “nothing anywhere close to an impeachable offense.” A Republican Congressman told Fox News the Majority “can’t identify a particular crime.” . . . It is obviously time to move on, Mr. Speaker. This impeachment is over.

Watch your back out there: It’s the Ides of March. Happy Friday.

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House Speaker Mike Johnson. (Bill Clark / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images.)

GOP Ex-Reps. To Johnson: Pass the Ukraine Bill

Speaker Johnson is getting a lot of mail these days: A group of 31 former House Republicans this month sent Johnson a private letter urging him to “bring the Ukraine aid bill to the floor as soon as possible,” The Bulwark has learned.

The letter, which was organized by former Rep. Susan Molinari of New York, was signed by many prominent and respected former members, including Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, Barbara Comstock of Virginia, Steve Bartlett of Texas, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, Chris Shays of Connecticut, and Fred Upton of Michigan.

Its text, which you can read in its original form here, is short and direct:

When we were given the privilege of serving in the United States Congress, we proudly served as members of the Republican Party. We were, and still are, dedicated to beliefs including limiting government overreach, supporting our military, and standing up to autocrats while defending democracies. It is not an exaggeration to say that our world is at a critical juncture. Vladimir Putin has a desire to change our world order as he has shown a territorial and barbaric thirst for Russian expansion. He has killed his political adversaries and jailed innocent Americans. So much is at stake: Alexei Navalny gave up his family, his health, and most recently, his life. Ukrainian President Zelenskyy has given up any assurance of personal safety. The Ukrainian people have given up everything but hope. We urge you not to let these sacrifices be in vain and to bring the Ukrainian aid bill to the floor as soon as possible.

It’s perhaps worth noting that these members can and do pick up the phone to talk to their former colleagues. They’re mostly the type to make a case on an issue they care about quietly and individually, not through a formal joint letter to the speaker. So the letter suggests they feel a high level of frustration and urgency.

They’ve received no response from Johnson, though his office acknowledges receipt of the missive.

This letter becomes public as pressure builds from several quarters on Johnson to allow Ukrainian aid to come to the floor, and to do so as quickly as possible.

For friends of Ukraine, these are grounds for hope. But every day of delay helps Putin and hurts Ukraine. This aid package was first considered, and was already considered crucial, at the end of September. That was half a year ago.

—William Kristol

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Kamala Harris Tours Planned Parenthood

Team Biden’s assessment of the 2024 state of play: The more abortion is on the public mind, the better.

That’s the obvious takeaway from Kamala Harris’s trip to Minneapolis Thursday, which featured—in what the White House said was a vice-presidential first—a visit to an abortion facility.

“Many of you have asked why I am here at this facility,” Harris told reporters after her tour of a local Planned Parenthood. “It is because right now in our country we are facing a very serious health crisis, and the crisis is affecting many, many people in our country, most of whom are frankly suffering in silence.”

Harris went on to praise the clinic’s workers for “providing health care in a safe place that gives people dignity.” “I’m here at this health care clinic,” she said, “to uplift the work that is happening in Minnesota as an example of what true leadership looks like.”

It was a remarkable statement. There’s a reason no other Democratic president or vice president had beaten Harris to this historic “first”: Democrats have long defended abortion rights while typically avoiding inviting voters to think much about the unsavory practice itself. And Biden, who is Catholic, is famously personally uncomfortable with abortion; he skipped the word altogether in his State of the Union address last week despite its being in his prepared remarks, opting to speak of “reproductive freedom” instead.

But the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to end Roe v. Wade upended both parties’ political calculus, giving Democrats new urgency on abortion, as well as—going by the outcomes of elections around the country in 2022 and 2023—a huge political advantage on the topic. Meanwhile, the Biden campaign has been keenly aware of their need to boost enthusiasm among young people and progressives; they see abortion politics as key to that effort.

Unsurprisingly, anti-abortion groups weren’t thrilled with the visit. “Kamala Harris has spent her whole career in the pocket of Big Abortion,” SBA Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser told The Bulwark in a statement, citing Harris’s prosecution as California attorney general of pro-life activist David Daleiden and the recent federal prosecution of protesters who blockaded the entrance to an abortion clinic in 2021. “Democrats’ all-trimester, no-limits abortion agenda,” Dannenfelser added, is “extreme and wildly out of step with America.”

Yet notably, prominent Republicans didn’t seem eager to push the point. Donald Trump didn’t write on Truth Social about Harris’s visit, his rapid-response team didn’t post a clip to social channels, and his campaign didn’t return a request for comment. The GOP’s RNC Research account—which exists for the sole purpose of posting unflattering video clips of Biden, Harris, and other Democrats in real time—shared plenty of clips of Biden looking elderly out on the trail yesterday, but none of Harris in Minnesota at all.

—Andrew Egger

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Catching up . . .

• Chuck Schumer urges new leadership in Israel, calling Netanyahu an obstacle to peace: New York Times

• U.S. firm that paid indicted FBI informant tied to Trump associates, records reveal: The Guardian

• Georgia racketeering case against Trump can continue if either Fani Willis or special prosecutor Nathan Wade remove themselves, judge rules: NBC News

• Trump-backed Ohio Senate candidate Bernie Moreno faces GOP worries that he could be linked to adult website profile: AP

• Weekly peak office attendance is still nowhere near pre-pandemic levels: Axios

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Quick Hits

1. The Bell Tolls

“Never-Trumpism didn’t die when the former president clinched the Republican presidential nomination on Tuesday,” Adam Wren of Politico wrote this week. “But the idea that a Never-Trump Republican might beat Donald Trump has expired for now—and may not be resuscitated any time soon.” 

Wren interviewed some familiar faces: Tim, Sarah, and our esteemed Morning Shots predecessor Charlie Sykes. Here was Charlie, who said that this week “feels like a dark exclamation point on the complete capitulation of the Republican Party”:

In 2015 and 2016, I was still very much a part of the conservative movement, and really expected that I would stay there. I found back then that if you did not get on board with Trumpism, you would get excommunicated. That’s an old story for me: jobs lost; friendships destroyed; once a while, I’ll go through my phone and look at the contacts, and be like, “Oh My God.” I haven’t spoken to that person in eight years. Why do people go along with this? Why do they bend their knee? Well, it’s because if you break with Trumpism, that means now breaking with the party, but it also means really breaking with, for many people, their social network. It was easier for me to do because I think I’m an only child.

Read the whole thing.

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2. Classified Briefings for Trump? 

In yesterday’s Press Pass, Joe dove deep on a thorny intelligence question: Will Donald Trump, currently on trial for alleged (but come on) mishandling of classified documents, start receiving the courtesy intelligence briefings customarily afforded to presidential nominees? 

Having secured enough delegates Tuesday night to become the Republican party’s presumptive nominee, Trump presumably will begin receiving classified briefings again in July after he receives the party’s official nomination at the Republican National Convention. Less than a week after Trump apparently reversed course on a national security policy priority because a billionaire GOP donor told him to (and also hung out with a European strongman cozy with the Chinese government, to boot), some of the lawmakers I spoke to are totally cool with the former president getting classified briefings once again, even though they are politically or morally opposed to him and don’t trust him . . .

The fear that Trump could leak, barter, or generally misuse intelligence has a rational basis in the dozens of charges against him, to say nothing of further reporting on the issue. (Have you spoken to any foreign businessmen with an unusually detailed understanding of our country’s fleet of nuclear submarines lately?) But there’s also the former president’s increasingly frequent praise of and meetings with dangerous authoritarians, as well as his love of big talk. No one can stop Trump from having a sitdown with Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping between July and November. Who knows what he might want to brag about. In private conversations, multiple Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee expressed real fears about the national security risks of fully briefing Trump as the campaign season advances.

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