Knives out for Speaker Johnson over Ukraine funding
What happened
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) faced an increasingly noisy hard-line threat to his position this week as obstacles to passing funding for aid to Ukraine multiplied. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) accused Johnson of “a complete and total surrender” to Democrats, writing in a fiery, five-page letter to colleagues that the speaker “is publicly saying funding Ukraine is now his top priority when less than 7 months ago he was against it.” Americans, she said, “believe our border is the only border worth fighting a war over.” Greene could at any time force a vote on her March 22 motion to oust Johnson from the speakership, lodged after he supported a $1.2 trillion government funding package. In another blow to Johnson’s standing, Republicans this week defeated his third attempt to reauthorize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows warrantless wiretaps on U.S. soil.
A $95 billion bipartisan Senate aid package passed in February includes $60 billion for Ukraine and $14 billion for Israel, and House members could force it to a vote via discharge petition if they get enough signatures. In the wake of Israel’s recent strike on a Gaza aid convoy, though, some Democrats now want the aid to Israel stripped out. Johnson, meanwhile, has been preparing his own Ukraine package that would structure some funding as a loan, require the Biden administration to seize and sell off Russian assets to compensate, and attach a mandate to reverse Biden’s pause on liquefied natural gas exports. Democrats called the last provision “a nonstarter.”
What the columnists said
Johnson faces “a very stark choice,” said Jake Sherman in Punchbowl News: “Pass a Ukraine aid bill or remain speaker.” Greene’s threats “should be viewed quite seriously.” Since the party’s twoseat House majority will fall to one next week when Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) retires, it wouldn’t take many votes to boot Johnson. Some Republicans say they’ll support Ukraine funding if paired with the strict border security measures they passed last May. But since that bill is “a no-go” with Democrats, those Republicans are “by definition opposed to Ukraine funding.”
Greene and the Republican right may claim to be motivated by border concerns, said Edward Luce in the Financial Times, but they get their talking points from the “Russian troll factories” that have been flooding the internet with disinformation. Greene’s lies about Ukraine “executing priests” and mounting a “Nazi army,” for example, come “straight from the Kremlin.” Forget isolationist. At this point, some Republicans are “actively pro-Russian.”
Ukraine can’t afford this delay, said William A. Galston in The Wall Street Journal. Congressional squabbling has left it so “desperately short of basic supplies” that its forces now fire just one fifth the artillery rounds of the Russians. If Russia wins due to U.S. inaction, more European countries will be at risk, and America would be revealed as unreliable to friend and foe alike. That’s why Democrats “shouldn’t stand in the way” of Johnson’s new plan for Ukraine aid—even if they find some parts unpalatable.