Will the House Vote on Ukraine Aid?
Speaker Mike Johnson floats new ideas on how to get a vote on Ukraine aid onto the House floor. What are the chances this comes together and passes?
The Speaker is moving forward on a vote on Ukraine Aid—a vote that the House has blocked since September of last year. “When we return after this work period,” Mike Johnson told Fox News on Sunday, “we’ll be moving a product, but it’s going to have some important innovations.”
That’s the good news. The bad news is that these “innovations” are unlikely to work.
Here are some of the elements Johnson floated to get an aid package for Ukraine to the floor:
Part of the aid might come in the form of a loan, noting that “even President Trump has talked about.”
But saddling a Ukrainian economy destroyed by years of war with debt to the richest nation on earth hardly seems much of a step forward.
Another part of the aid could be paid by seizing Russian assets frozen in American accounts—something the REPO Act that is making its way through Congress would authorize. “If we can use the seized assets of Russian oligarchs to allow the Ukrainians to fight them, that’s just pure poetry,” he said.
But the legal foundation for seizing those assets specifically limits their use to Ukrainian recovery and reconstruction, not to fight a war.
Finally, Johnson suggested that the bill include the lifting of a White House moratorium on granting permission to build additional LNG export terminals—including one off the Louisiana coast, which of course is Johnson’s home state.
But even without new permitting, existing construction of new LNG export terminals is slated to double the amount of gas that can be exported between now and 2030. Of course, such legislative logrolling has a fine tradition, so kudos to Johnson for giving it a try.
The real problem of all these innovations is that Johnson is focusing on solving an issue with his Republican caucus rather than finding a way to get Ukraine the aid it needs. There is no doubt that if he put the supplemental aid package the Senate passed weeks ago to a vote, it would pass overwhelming—including by the two-thirds majority it might need for Johnson to bring it up for a vote without approval of the Rules Committee.
Johnson fears that if he were to do that, however, his recalcitrant right-wing could move to oust him as Speaker—a vote that he could only survive with the help of Democrats. That would either make him the shortest serving Speaker in history or the first Speaker to keep his job at the behest of the opposition—neither a politically enticing prospect.
But crafting a package that satisfies his deeply divided Republican caucus may not offer a way out for Johnson either. It isn’t at all clear that he could get even a majority of his own party, let alone of Democrats, to go along with this kind of package—though that will depend in part on the details. Nor is it clear that the Senate can pass the package, given that it will need 60 votes, and some Democrats and more Republicans may balk to vote in favor.
In the end, the key to whether a Johnson package will get enough Republican votes to pass will depend less on the details but on the attitude of one person: Donald Trump. His “yes” should secure passage. His “no” would doom it.
Watch this space.