How Mike Johnson Got to ‘Yes’ on Aid to Ukraine
Intelligence, politics and personal considerations
converted the Republican speaker, who had largely opposed aid to Ukraine as a
rank-and-file member, into the key figure pushing it through Congress.
‘History Will Judge It Well,’ Speaker Johnson Says of
Aid to Ukraine
Speaker Mike Johnson successfully defied the
anti-interventionalist wing of the Republican Party and got the House to
approve a $95 billion foreign aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
Catie
Edmondson
By Catie
Edmondson
Reporting
from the Capitol
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/21/us/politics/mike-johnson-turnaround.html
April 21,
2024, 5:01 a.m. ET
For weeks
after the Senate passed a sprawling aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan,
Speaker Mike Johnson agonized over whether and how the House would take up
funding legislation that would almost certainly infuriate the right wing of his
party and could cost him his job.
He huddled
with top national security officials, including William J. Burns, the C.I.A.
director, in the Oval Office to discuss classified intelligence. He met
repeatedly with broad factions of Republicans in both swing and deep red
districts, and considered their voters’ attitudes toward funding Ukraine. He
thought about his son, who is set to attend the U.S. Naval Academy in the fall.
And
finally, when his plan to work with Democrats to clear the way for aiding
Ukraine met with an outpouring of venom from ultraconservatives already
threatening to depose him, Mr. Johnson, an evangelical Christian, knelt and
prayed for guidance.
“I want to
be on the right side of history,” Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, the
chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, recalled the speaker telling him.
Mr.
Johnson’s decision to risk his speakership to push the $95 billion foreign aid
bill through the House on Saturday was the culmination of a remarkable personal
and political arc for the Louisiana Republican. It was also an improbable
outcome for a man plucked from relative obscurity last fall by the hard right —
which had just deposed a speaker they deemed a traitor to their agenda — to be
the speaker of a deeply dysfunctional House.
As a
rank-and-file hard-liner, Mr. Johnson had largely opposed efforts to fund
Kyiv’s war effort. And early in his speakership, he declared he would never
allow the matter to come to a vote until his party’s border demands were met.
But by the
time he made clear he planned to band together with Democrats to muscle through
the aid package over the objections of many in his party, Mr. Johnson was
speaking a starkly different language.
“History
judges us for what we do,” he told reporters at the Capitol last week. “This is
a critical time right now. I could make a selfish decision and do something
that’s different. But I’m doing here what I believe to be the right thing. I
think providing lethal aid to Ukraine right now is critically important.”
Mr. Johnson
attributed his turnabout in part to the intelligence briefings he received, a
striking assertion from a leader of a party that has embraced former President
Donald J. Trump’s deep mistrust of the intelligence community.
“I really
do believe the intel,” Mr. Johnson said. “I think that Vladimir Putin would
continue to march through Europe if he were allowed. I think he might go to the
Baltics next. I think he might have a showdown with Poland or one of our NATO
allies.”
Mr. McCaul,
who repeatedly huddled with Mr. Johnson and the chairmen of the other
congressional national security committees in a secure room of the Capitol
where lawmakers can review classified material, described Mr. Johnson’s journey
as “transformational.”
“All of a
sudden, he’s realizing that the world depends on this,” Mr. McCaul said. “This
is not some little political game on the floor.”
One of the
most impactful briefings, according to people familiar with the discussions,
came in February in the Oval Office, when congressional leaders met with Mr.
Biden to discuss government funding and aid for Ukraine. At that meeting, Mr.
Burns and other top national security officials sought to impress upon Mr.
Johnson how rapidly Ukraine was running out of ammunition, and how dire the
consequences would be if their air defenses were no longer reinforced by
American weaponry.
Convinced
that they would come around to his way of thinking, Mr. Johnson repeatedly
urged Republicans who opposed the funding measure to go to the secure space at
the Capitol and receive the same intelligence briefings, according to people he
spoke to.
Mr. Johnson
was also struck by the stories he heard in meetings with President Volodymyr
Zelensky of Ukraine and others about the magnitude of the misery Russian forces
have unleashed across the embattled nation. All of it tugged at Mr. Johnson’s
sense of Christian faith.
The speaker
also faced mounting political pressure to act. Senate Democrats had struck a
deal with Republicans to pair the aid to Ukraine with strict border measures,
as the G.O.P. had demanded, but after Mr. Trump denounced it, Republicans
rejected it out of hand. Then the Senate passed its own $95 billion emergency
aid legislation for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan without any immigration
measures, and the onus was on the House to do the same.
Adding to
Mr. Johnson’s predicament, he found himself badly out of step with the three
other congressional leaders, most notably Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican
of Kentucky, who vocally supported bolstering Kyiv and saw it as a critical
part of his legacy.
That was
evident at the White House meeting in February, which Senator Chuck Schumer,
Democrat of New York and the majority leader, described as an “intense”
pile-on.
“Everyone
in that room was telling Speaker Johnson how vital” sending aid was, he said
then.
Privately,
Mr. Johnson was huddling with his allies and puzzling over what measures they
could include in a national security package to make it more palatable to
Republicans. At retreats in Florida in February and West Virginia in March, he
was already in discussions with Representative French Hill, Republican of
Arkansas, about the REPO Act, which would pay for some of the aid by selling
off Russian sovereign assets that had been frozen.
That
provision, which he described as “pure poetry,” later became a key part of Mr.
Johnson’s effort to sell his conference on the aid bill.
Around the
same time, Mr. Johnson began — first privately, then loudly — telling allies
that he would ensure the U.S. would send funding to Kyiv.
“I think he
always understood the importance of this and believes in the importance of
this,” Representative Mike Lawler, Republican of New York, said. “The function
of being speaker is to try to build consensus, and I think he wanted to find
consensus among the conference. Unfortunately, there are some folks that are
just unwilling to compromise.”
In a small
meeting with lawmakers, Mr. Johnson “made it pretty clear that if we didn’t get
this done in April, that it could be too late for Ukraine,” Representative Don
Bacon, Republican of Nebraska, said.
Patience
among politically vulnerable Republicans who wanted to cast a vote in support
of Ukraine also was running out. Mr. Johnson told reporters on Thursday that he
believed that if he did not act soon, G.O.P. lawmakers would try to circumvent
him by using a procedure called a discharge petition to force a vote on the
Senate bill.
“If the
House did not do this better policy and process — allowing for amendments on
the floor in the process tomorrow — we would have had to eat the Senate
supplemental bill,” he said.
By the time
he agreed to advance an aid package, he had to contend with a wave of anger
from his political home — the right wing of the Republican conference — whose
members accused Mr. Johnson of betraying them, and repeatedly urged him to
change course.
In a heated
scene in the back row of the House chamber last week, a group of hard-liners
surrounded the speaker and urged him to tie the foreign aid package to
stringent anti-immigration measures.
Mr. Johnson
pushed back, replying that he would not have enough Republican support to
advance such a measure. He told them he was not worried about his own
speakership, but was seriously worried about Ukraine’s ability to hold off
Russia without U.S. aid, according to a lawmaker on the floor for the
discussion.
“My message
to the speaker has been: ‘Stay true to the mission,’” Mr. Hill said. “You know
what has to be done. And you know that you have to do the best you can, with
the circumstances that we found ourselves in.”
The passage
of the aid package unleashed a fresh wave of fury among hard-liners.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who is leading the charge to
oust Mr. Johnson, promised that more Republicans would rally to her side.
“This is
the third betrayal by Mike Johnson,” she fumed on the House steps minutes after
the vote on Saturday, citing the government funding bills and legislation he
advanced to renew an expiring warrantless surveillance law as his first two
transgressions.
“A foreign
war package that does nothing for America?” she continued. “It’s unbelievable.
I’m thankful that America gets to see who this man is.”
For his
part, Mr. Johnson skipped a victory lap on Saturday, never taking to the House
floor to make the case for any of the aid bills — as speakers almost always do
when matters of major import come before the chamber — and staying away as
lawmakers cast their votes. After the legislation’s passage, he offered clipped
remarks about the importance of the aid and chastised Democrats who had waved
Ukrainian flags on the floor, noting that the only flags that should be
displayed in the chamber were American ones.
But earlier
in the week, Mr. Johnson had been more reflective, telling reporters that
during tough times, he took comfort in an adage about former President John
Quincy Adams’s time in Congress.
Another
lawmaker asked Mr. Adams why he continued bringing up the same resolution to
end slavery, only to see it fail each time. In Mr. Johnson’s telling, Mr. Adams
replied: “Duty is ours. Results are God’s.”
“To me,
that’s a very liberating thought,” Mr. Johnson said. “I’m going to do my duty,
and the results are not ultimately up to me. I’m comfortable with that. We’ll
see what happens, and we’ll lay the chips down on the table.”
Catie
Edmondson covers Congress for The Times. More about Catie
Edmondson
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