Congressional Showdowns

Three big, consequential votes are looming in the House and the Senate before the holiday break

Rep. George Santos, Photo by J. Scott Applewhite / AP; Sen. Tommy Tuberville, Photo by Jose Luis Magana / AP

Congress is back from Thanksgiving, and all the leftovers are about to get reheated, with several controversial matters up for votes.

The Republican Chair of the House Ethics Committee, Rep. Michael Guest (R-MS), reintroduced a resolution to expel Rep. George Santos (R-NY) from Congress. Because of its nature, the resolution must be acted upon within two days. Things aren’t looking very good for Santos this time around, however, after a scathing bipartisan report from Guest’s own committee found numerous violations, including use of campaign funds for Santos’s personal benefit. 

Also in the House, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) intends to bring up aid to Israel and Ukraine. Johnson has signaled that he supports both, but with some conditions. Namely, he wants to see border security measures added to the package, but their nature and scope remains unclear. Senate negotiators are facing similar pressures from extremist GOP members who insist on draconian, anti-migrant measures.

Finally, the Senate will vote on a resolution to get around a nine-month blockade of military promotions by Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL). Due to Senate rules, the proposed “standing order,” which would be in place only through the rest of this term, requires at least 60 votes to pass. That means at least nine GOP senators must come on board, assuming all Democrats and independents support it as they have currently indicated. But the measure is in trouble. Senate GOP leadership opposes it, so it’s unclear whether Republicans will block the proposed order, leaving U.S. forces at an unprecedented state of unreadiness.

Let’s unpack these each a bit more.

Santos on his way out?

The first two times Santos faced an expulsion motion, the House failed in each instance to muster the two-thirds vote needed to kick him out. Many members, from both parties, were reluctant to vote for expulsion before the House Ethics Committee had released its report. This made some sense; it would be a worrisome precedent if expulsions occurred prior to a member having had a full opportunity to respond to formal allegations.

But now that the Ethics Committee report is out and has recommended Santos’s expulsion, these concerns are greatly lessened. Santos has had his chance to present his side of the story, and he came up short. Indeed, he failed in many ways to cooperate with the Committee at all. Many members who previously demurred on voting to expel have since indicated that they will now join their colleagues to remove Santos from Congress.

Santos appears ready to write some lipstick on the mirror. “I know I’m going to get expelled when this expulsion resolution goes to the floor,” Santos said Friday night on Spaces on the X platform. “I’ve done the math over and over, and it doesn’t look really good.” He declined to address any specifics of the report, which he claimed were “slanderous” and “designed to force me out of my seat.” And he argued that any statements by him in his own defense before the Committee would have compromised his criminal case.

For his congressional colleagues, however, Santos spared few words. He alleged that many cast votes on the floor while drunk and, in a whataboutism for the ages, charged that within the ranks of Congress, “there’s felons galore, there’s people with all sorts of shystie backgrounds.”

This week, if the GOP has any principles at all, there may be one less felon in the House. Much will depend on what Speaker Mike Johnson advises his conference to do.

Aid for our allies… with conditions

Speaking of the Speaker, a new and upbeat tone has emerged from GOP House leadership on the subject of aid to our allies. Speaker Johnson now says he's “confident and optimistic” that Congress will be able to approve additional funds to help both Israel and Ukraine, and that it will come before the holidays. “I think all of that will come together in the coming days,” Johnson said, adding that “we’ll be able to get that done—get that over the line.”

Johnson labeled aid to Israel a “top priority” and helping Ukraine “another priority.” This is a shift; before becoming Speaker, Johnson voted frequently against further aid to Ukraine. But his words now seem more in line with GOP Senate leadership.

“Of course, we can’t allow Vladimir Putin to march through Europe, and we understand the necessity of assisting there,” he said. 

The caveat is that Congress still needs to factor in border security measures sought by Republicans, who are seeking to condition the aid on approval of such measures. 

“What we’ve said is that if there is to be additional assistance to Ukraine, which most members of Congress believe is important, we have to also work [on] changing our own border policy,” Johnson emphasized.

Johnson may allow Senate negotiators to hammer out that part of the package, since any inclusion of border security measures has to also pass that Democratically-controlled chamber. Currently, Senate leaders from the two parties remain fairly far apart, with Republicans favoring harsh, militarized border measures while Democrats want to see broader immigration reform and paths for naturalization. Indeed, going into the break, there was widespread pessimism about how the talks were going.

Sen. John Thune (R-SD), the No. 2 Senate Republican, told reporters before the break that talks were “not good,” while Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) agreed they were “not going well.” Tillis elaborated, “No, it’s not going well as long as we can’t get acknowledgement that the future flows [of migrants] have to be dramatically reduced by policy, not by funding.” Tillis told reporters, “There’s a foundational question about future flows that has to be answered and how you can measure it.”

Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) wasn’t having it. “This has injected a decades-old, hyper-partisan issue into overwhelmingly bipartisan priorities. Democrats stand ready to work on common-sense solutions to address immigration, but purely partisan hard-right demands, like those in H.R. 2, jeopardize the entire national security supplemental package,” Schumer added.

A vote to moot Tuberville’s blockade

Perhaps the most consequential vote soon to be taken up by the Senate is a proposed “standing order” that would circumvent Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s blockade of over 450 military promotions. The resolution, announced by Schumer yesterday, would permit the Senate to vote for the promotions as a group, making any objection such as Tuberville’s only an irksome delay, not a catastrophic backlog as he has managed to create through multiple objections.

Recently, several GOP senators took to the chamber’s floor to excoriate Tuberville for holding up the promotions. They included veterans such as Sens. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) and Joni Ernst (R-IA) as well as hawks such as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). But Tuberville would not relent, generating a growing sense of frustration within the Republican Party.

The proposed resolution now puts the GOP in a bit of a political bind. It’s a simple matter to approve it—only nine GOP senators need to agree—but many are wary. Some worry it opens the door to allow similar resolutions that get around built-in procedural powers vested in each senator. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell opposes the resolution for this ostensible reason.

Perhaps more deeply, many GOP senators are worried that a “yes” vote will make them targets of Heritage Action, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation, which has backed Tuberville and made support of his absolute blockade a “scoreable” issue for rating how conservative members are on the question of abortion.

Indeed, support for Tuberville and his anti-abortion crusade, even at the expense of military readiness, has become a touchstone for extremist candidates. Said Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is hoping to win his party’s nomination for president, “I support what Tommy Tuberville is doing… our recruiting is in the absolute gutter now and you’re funding abortion tourism?” (The military currently reimburses women who must travel out of state to receive abortion services, and it it is this policy that Tuberville claims is motivating his total blockade.)

Opposing the resolution, however, pits GOP senators against the military, which they have traditionally supported without reservation. It opens them up to political attack ads in the general election. And it ties them to Tuberville, who lately has not made that affiliation any easier.

“We have the weakest military than we’ve probably had in my lifetime,” Tuberville claimed, without evidence, during a Newsmax interview just last night. 

His critics quickly noted that this simply isn’t true. But if the military has been seriously weakened, that’s entirely on him.