Johnson pushes ahead on US aid for Ukraine, allies
House speaker rejects GOP call for him to resign
WASHINGTON — Defiant and determined, House Speaker Mike Johnson pushed back Tuesday against mounting Republican anger over his proposed US aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and other allies, and rejected a call to step aside or risk a vote to oust him from office.
“I am not resigning,” Johnson said after a testy morning meeting of fellow House Republicans at the Capitol
Johnson referred to himself as a “wartime speaker” of the House and indicated in his strongest self-defense yet he would press forward with a US national security aid package, a situation that would force him to rely on Democrats to help pass it, over objections from his weakened majority.
“We are simply here trying to do our jobs,” Johnson said, calling the motion to oust him “absurd . . . not helpful.”
Tuesday brought a definitive shift in tone from both the House Republicans and the speaker himself at a pivotal moment as the embattled leader tries, against the wishes of his majority, to marshal the votes needed to send the stalled national security aid for Israel, Ukraine, and other overseas allies to passage.
Johnson appeared emboldened by his meeting late last week at Donald Trump’s Mar-aLago resort in Florida when the Republican former president threw him a political lifeline with a nod of support.
Johnson also spoke over the weekend with President Biden as well as other congressional leaders about the emerging US aid package, which the speaker plans to move in separate votes for each section — with bills for Ukraine, Israel, and the IndoPacific region. He spoke to Biden about it again late Monday.
After Johnson briefed the president, White House officials said they were taking a wait-and-see approach until the text of the speaker’s plan is released and the procedural pathway becomes more clear.
“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 on Tuesday.
The speaker is considering a complicated approach that would break apart the Senate’s $95 billion aid package for separate votes, and then either stitch it back together or send the components to the Senate for final passage, and potentially onto the White House for the president’s signature.
All told, it would require the speaker to cobble together bipartisan majorities with different factions of House Republicans and Democrats on each measure.
Additionally, Johnson is preparing a fourth measure that would include various Republican-preferred national security priorities, such as a plan to seize some Russian assets in US banks to help fund Ukraine and another to turn the economic aid for Ukraine into loans. It could also include provisions to sanction Iran over its weekend attack on Israel, among others.
The speaker’s emerging plan is not an automatic dealbreaker for Democrats in the House and Senate, with leaders refraining from comment until text details are released.
House Republicans, meanwhile, were livid that Johnson would be leaving their top priority — efforts to impose more security at the US-Mexico border — on the sidelines. Some predicted Johnson will not be able to push ahead with voting on the package this week, as planned. Representative Debbie Lesko of Arizona called the meeting an “argument fest.”