Threading the Needle

Speaker Johnson has come forward with a dicey plan to move aid to Ukraine and other allies forward. It faces an uncertain future.

Speaker Mike Johnson inadvertently motions toward Donald Trump when speaking about “hardened criminals” at their meeting in Florida. Photo courtesy of Wilfredo Lee / AP

Getting anything through this Congress is hard. Getting Ukraine aid through is even harder. But it looks like Speaker Johnson is finally ready to at least attempt it.

The Putin wing within the GOP is bent on denying aid to our ally, Ukraine, despite the fact that Russia could well conquer that nation without our help, and that most of the aid money stays right here at home, paying U.S. weapons manufacturers for the munitions provided.

The Senate long ago approved aid to Ukraine in a package that also funds aid for Israel, Taiwan and Gaza. But it’s been held up in the House, where Speaker Mike Johnson has refused to allow a floor vote.

There are two main reasons for that, neither very reassuring. Donald Trump, who is always willing to help out his pal Putin, is opposed to the aid. He’s been keeping the pressure on to block it, including opposing the compromise border security bill that would have moved aid forward.

There’s also Marjorie Taylor Greene (Q-GA), who has threatened to oust Speaker Johnson through a motion to vacate should he bring Ukraine aid to the House floor. She’s now joined by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), meaning Johnson is probably toast if the Democrats don’t vote to save him.

Now Speaker Johnson is attempting a maneuver that will allow the House to vote separately on bills, decoupling Israeli and Ukraine aid. But will this work, and will he keep his job? Today’s piece looks at this question two ways, in what I call the cynic’s view and the optimist’s view. 

The cynic’s view

Speaker Johnson now plans not one vote but four. He intends to separate out aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan and other allies into three separate measures for the House to vote on. Then, to placate Republican opponents of aid, he’ll add a fourth bill with a host of measures in it that are popular among Republicans, including conditioning Ukraine aid as a loan, banning TikTok, and selling off certain Russian sovereign assets to help pay for the aid package.

Noticeably absent from the bills, however, are two things.

First, there is not even a mention on border security—the hot-potato issue that has held up aid for months. This is likely by design, and at the insistence of Democrats and the White House. After all, a border security bill that was hard won through months of negotiation already had been coupled to the aid, but it was Johnson who wouldn’t allow that to come to a vote. The absence of a border discussion will likely draw Republican opposition but Democratic and, ironically, Donald Trump’s support. After all, the last thing Trump wants is any success in actually fixing the “border crisis” he hopes to harp on for the next few months.

Second, there is at present no provision for humanitarian aid, including aid to Gaza. Were that to remain the case, it would make the measure unpalatable to progressives. Many already are opposed to further unconditional aid to Israel at a time when Prime Minister Netanyahu continues a war at devastating cost to human lives. In this sense, by seeking to leave out support for Gaza relief, Johnson is still politicizing the bill by seeking to drive a wedge into Democratic support for it. 

In a podcast interview with The New Republic, Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ) questioned why the bill isn’t just the same one that the Senate passed by an overwhelming vote, rather than one broken up in this way. That’s a good question. Such a bill would streamline the process rather than slow it down. Rep. Sherrill also noted that the Senate is out of session next week, so this could take some time to get through the Senate even if it passes the House. It seems at least possible that Johnson knows all this and is intentionally trying to create more delay.

Rep. Sherrill also said that Democrats would insist on including aid to Gaza in the bill, but she hadn’t seen that as of yet. Democrats are understandably tired of Republicans holding Ukraine aid hostage in order to exact other demands. And in this case Speak—I mean, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has been clear. He told Democrats on Tuesday that he would not be willing to support any package that included less than the $9 billion in humanitarian aid already passed by the Senate. That money funds not only Gaza, but also relief efforts in Ukraine, Somalia, Haiti and Sudan.

Speaker Johnson could elect to stand his ground on this, then blame Democrats for not coming on board and moving the package forward. If Democrats want Ukraine aid so badly, after all, they should be willing to sacrifice others to get it, meaning of course mostly African and Middle Eastern people desperately in need of aid. The bills would then fail to come out of Committee as a package, and no aid would be forthcoming in any form to anyone.

Johnson could then reattempt a floor vote on a stand-alone Israel aid package, which Democrats would vote down once again because it leaves Ukraine and others out in the cold. Republicans could then point to the vote in attack ads and say that Democrats didn’t vote to help Israel, even after Iran launched a deadly missile attack upon the Jewish state. 

In sum, the cynic’s view is that, deep down, Johnson doesn’t really want Ukraine aid to pass, and he is setting all this up to fail. The American public will never understand the nuances of why Democrats had to vote Israeli aid down in order to not allow Ukraine aid to die.

The optimist’s view

The optimist’s view begins from the premise that Johnson really does want to see Ukraine get through, but needs to tread carefully around both Trump and Greene. If he really wanted to tank Ukraine aid, the thinking goes, he could have simply sat on it and done nothing, rather than devised clever but difficult paths forward. Presently, I lean toward this view, but we’ll know more in the following days.

One of the key tests will be what shape the package assumes as it comes out of the Rules Committee. That powerful body is dominated by Republicans and includes a veto-armed set of hardliners who will likely vote against anything resembling the Senate aid package. And that will mean Johnson will need to once again do the previously unthinkable: turn to Democrats on the Committee to get the bill out of it and onto the House floor.

That should mean, rather incredibly, that Democrats will have a strong hand in shaping the aid bill, including what goes into it. So while Johnson has announced a four-bill plan that leaves a lot out, including a deal-breaking absence of humanitarian aid, Democrats united under their leader Jeffries could insist that the humanitarian aid go back in. While they’re at it, they could even take out some of the provisions in the “fourth” bill that attempt to condition the aid.

Johnson knows that even putting the bill up for a Rules vote could trigger that Greene-led motion to vacate. To survive such a motion, he will, again rather incredibly, have to rely on a few Democrats to vote to keep him in office. Some members, including Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), have already signaled that they would be amenable to this, as they don’t wish to see Johnson punished for doing the right thing.

“Massie wants the world to burn, I won’t stand by and watch,” Rep. Moskowitz tweeted, referring to the second GOP representative in favor of ousting Speaker Johnson. “I have a bucket of water.” 

To sum up, we have a Speaker who is beholden to and must placate a non-elected yet de facto head of his party, who is being threatened with ouster by his right flank, and who must now work with Democrats to move a critical bill through because his own party lies in total disarray.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s exactly like the the situation faced by the former speaker, Kevin McCarthy, before his own ouster. We can only hope that Speaker Johnson has learned enough from that fiasco to cooperate rather than burn bridges with the very people he will be counting on to cross party lines and keep him from being deposed.

Still, it is disquieting in the extreme to know that the fate of the free world currently rests in the hands of an inexperienced fundamentalist oddball who jumps whenever his puppet master pulls his strings and believes in Noah’s Ark. If there is any reason for optimism, it is that Johnson emerged from his meeting with Trump with some assurances that he can keep his job. The two met last week and pledged support for duplicative legislation to address a non-existing problem of “illegal” alien residents voting. In exchange, it seems, Trump won’t come for Johnson’s head if he moves forward with a bill package that includes Ukraine.

Further, and importantly, more “traditional” Republicans who chair key committees, such as Mike Turner (R-OH) of House Intelligence, Michael McCaul (R-TX) of House Foreign Affairs, and Mike Rogers (R-AL) of the House Armed Services Committee, are highly supportive of Johnson’s actions. Turner and McCaul have also been increasingly vocal in their condemnation of the party’s Putin wing.

For its part, the White House, which has been meeting with Speaker Johnson about the plan, is sounding an upbeat but slightly qualified tone. “It does appear at first blush, that the speaker’s proposal will, in fact, help us get aid to Ukraine, aid to Israel and needed resources to the Indo-Pacific for a wide range of contingencies there,” John Kirby, the White House’s national security spokesman, told reporters yesterday. The “first blush” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

While I am also somewhat optimistic, I have seen enough shenanigans and last minute interference by Trump and the MAGA right to know that nothing is certain until the bill emerges, the text is dissected, and the votes are taken. But if history is any guide, the Democrats likely will ultimately emerge as the real adults in the room and vote together and in greater numbers than the GOP, as they have on every other major piece of legislation, to send the bills to the House floor and on to passage. 

For Ukraine and the world’s sake, let’s hope the optimistic view is correct.