House works to advance Ukraine, Israel aid
WASHINGTON — House congressional leaders were toiling Thursday on a delicate, bipartisan push toward weekend votes to approve a $95 billion package of foreign aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, as well as several other national security policies at a critical moment at home and abroad.
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson this week set in motion a plan to advance the package, which has been held up since October by GOP lawmakers resistant to approving more funding for Ukraine’s fight against Russia. As the Republican speaker faced an outright rebellion from his right flank and growing threats for his ouster, it became clear House Democrat Leader Hakeem Jeffries would have to lend help to Johnson every step of the way.
“This is a very important message we are going to send to the world this week, and I’m anxious to get it done,” Johnson said Wednesday in announcing his strategy.
The growing momentum for a bipartisanship dynamic, a rarity in the deeply divided Congress, brought rare scenes of Republicans and Democrats working together to assert U.S. standing on the global stage and help American allies. But it also sent Johnson’s House Republican majority into fresh rounds of chaos.
Johnson’s Republican leadership team, seizing on the opportunity to outflank hardline conservatives with Democratic support, raised the idea of quickly changing the procedural rules to make it harder to oust the speaker from office.
But ultra-conservatives reacted with fury, angrily confronting Johnson on the House floor in a tense scene Thursday morning. Several suggested they would join the effort to oust Johnson if the rule was changed. By the afternoon, Johnson backed away from the idea.
“We will continue to govern under the existing rules,” the speaker said on the social platform X.
Meanwhile, a rare image of bipartisan statesmanship was on display as the procedural Rules committee began to debate launching the steps needed to push the foreign aid package forward toward weekend voting.
The Republican chairmen of the powerful Appropriations and Foreign Affairs committees, alongside their top Democratic counterparts, spoke in evocative language, some drawing on World War II history, to make the case for ensuring the U.S. stand with its allies against aggressors.
Chairman Michael McCaul of the Foreign Affairs Committee cast this as a “pivotal” time in world history, comparing the current images of people fleeing the conflict in Europe to the situation in 1939 as Hitler’s Germany rose to power. “Time is not on our side,” he told the panel.
The top Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Greg Meeks of New York, shared McCaul’s urgency: “The camera of history is rolling.”
Johnson is trying to advance a complex plan to hold individual votes this weekend on the funds for Ukraine, Israel and allies in the Asia-Pacific, then stitch the package back together.
Late Thursday night, the four Democrats on the Rules committee voted for a procedural move to advance the bill to the House floor, while three archconservative Republicans voted against it.
Rarely, if ever, does the minority party help the majority through the procedural hoops, particularly in the House Rules committee or during the various floor votes before final passage. It represented a level of bipartisanship unseen in this Congress, even as Republican leaders watched their own priority bills defeated on procedural votes by their own members.