Johnson Moves on Ukraine Aid; Republicans Barely Holding It Together

Plus: One of the great political news stories, twelve years later.

(Bulwark edit / Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

The House is going to hold several votes this week on foreign aid bills after months of preventing a single foreign aid bill from coming to the floor. The immediate reason is Iran’s strikes against Israel over the weekend, which has lent new urgency to the need to provide assistance to our Middle Eastern ally. But Speaker Mike Johnson says the aid packages that will be voted on this week will also include support for Ukraine and Taiwan.

Remember the comprehensive foreign aid package that already passed the Senate? If the House were to vote on that, it could get to President Joe Biden’s desk to be signed into law by mid-week, which would do much to allay concerns about dysfunction and legislative inefficiency in the House. However, that’s not the path the House’s Republican majority wants to take. While it’s unclear if the new plan will actually garner the support of the majority of House Republicans—more on that in a moment—here is how you should expect things to unfold.

Johnson is moving four bills, which will be allowed to have amendments. The bills will be considered and voted on separately but combined under a single rule. 

The four bills will be:

• Israel aid

• Ukraine aid

• Taiwan aid

• A convoluted package that includes a TikTok ban, a lend-lease act to reduce red tape in supplying military aid to Ukraine (the lend-lease for Ukraine expired on September 30, 2023), and an authorization for the United States to sell seized Russian assets.

While it’s not a particularly complicated plan, this is the 118th Congress: The political reality is what makes things complicated. Here are some factors to keep in mind.

First, there is no official text for the bills yet, and some of them will have to be written to thread a tiny legislative needle if they want to have a hope of passing. For example, any Ukraine aid text will have to be palatable to a significant share of the chamber’s Democrats because many Republicans will reject new Ukraine funding out of hand, and Johnson can only afford to lose two of his colleagues on any given vote for a bill to pass on his majority alone. Support for Israel will no doubt lose some Democrats, as well. A sticking point for Democrats considering both bills will be the inclusion of humanitarian aid in addition to military support. 

The third bill is a safer proposition: Virtually everyone in both chambers is highly supportive of aid to Taiwan. But as for the fourth bill, there is a small but mighty contingent of lawmakers opposed to any TikTok ban, and a bill to codify a policy that complex will have to be airtight to prevent it from bleeding support. 

The second thing to keep in mind is that Johnson has said there will be a structured amendments process. This means the Rules Committee will allow votes on select amendments. This is in contrast to an open process, which allows anyone to offer whatever amendment they want as long as it’s deemed germane. An open rule would allow for all kinds of items to be tacked on to the aid package; not allowing it could anger many Republicans in the Freedom Caucus and their allies, who might prefer the option of attaching messaging amendments or other baggage that could sap support for the bills. (Of course, the sort of folks who would do this wouldn’t support the final product regardless of the particulars of the amendments process.)

Lastly and most importantly, the rule vote to bring the bills to the floor will need Democratic support. Rule votes are typically passed solely by the majority, even if members of the minority party end up supporting the legislation on its final vote. (The inverse is also true: Members of the majority sometimes back the rule only to oppose a bill’s final passage.) When Kevin McCarthy couldn’t pass the rule vote on the debt ceiling deal last year, Democrats came to the rescue, which opened the first seal in the apocalyptic last days of his short tenure as speaker of the House. Johnson is not waiting for a failed rule vote to announce his need of rescue: His plan requires Democratic help from the outset. 

In the House Republican Conference meeting this morning, Johnson laid out the procedural advantages to this bespoke process, which could prevent the Senate from skipping over or altering aid to Israel. Even so, both chambers will still have to reconcile their differences.

Easy enough, right? But nothing is easy in Congress, and that applies in a special way to the 118th. In the event Johnson’s assemblage of bills explodes on either takeoff or reentry, a Republican member told Punchbowl News’s Jake Sherman, “the floodgates will open” and Republicans will flock to sign the discharge petition on the Senate-passed foreign aid package. I heard this same theory from a Democratic staffer, but I don’t buy it. There is no greater sin in the modern GOP than working with Democrats on an issue that’s been roped into the politics of the moment, and even the most hawkish Republicans know that.¹ Just ask James Lankford.

If Johnson can get all the four amended bills through the House in one piece by the end of the week—and it’s a big if, especially considering that representatives must have 72 hours to read the text of a bill before voting on it—the bills will then go on to the Senate, where each will face its own hurdles, although that chamber is far more amenable to legislation of great importance. 

If Johnson moves forward with the foreign aid bills, it will likely trigger a motion to vacate the chair by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.). Greene has already introduced this motion, but she hasn’t yet made it privileged (the mechanism that actually forces the vote to occur).

Later in this morning’s House Republican Conference meeting, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) told Speaker Johnson that he will cosponsor Greene’s motion to vacate and that Johnson should pre-announce his resignation. After the meeting, Johnson told reporters, “I regard myself as a wartime speaker,” adding:

I am not resigning. That is in my view, an absurd notion that someone would bring a vacate motion, we are simply here trying to do our jobs. It is not helpful to the cause.

At least some Democrats will likely come to Johnson’s rescue if he successfully moves a Ukraine aid deal through the House. This will be necessary to save his job, because Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) is resigning at the end of the week; Gallagher’s seat becoming vacant means that if Massie and Greene are cosponsoring the motion to vacate, then even if every other Republican votes to save Johnson’s gavel, the speaker will still end up one vote short. Johnson’s job is safe for now, but if his foreign aid plan doesn’t work out and he doesn’t end up with anything to offer Democrats in a bid for their help, his speakership could end up going the way of his immediate predecessor’s, and fast.

Penguin Classics

Today is the twelfth anniversary of a major political event: the time a penguin bit former speaker of the House and then-presidential candidate Newt Gingrich.

While visiting the St. Louis Zoo in 2012, Gingrich reached out toward a penguin, which promptly snapped at his finger. He would have to wear a bandage for the next couple of days on the campaign trail.

This was a minor story in the 2012 presidential campaign cycle, but it holds a special place in my brain because my professor read it aloud to the entire class at Arizona State University. I thought I’d share this memory with you all today so that you can one day use it as a random anecdote, too. 

1. You can derive an example from this very situation: Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) broke party ranks by signing a letter with Democrats urging Johnson to pass the standalone foreign aid package. But the letter is just a gesture. Wilson still won’t sign the actual discharge petition that would force a vote on the exact legislation he advocated for in the letter.