House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has revealed a series of foreign aid bills totaling $95 billion that come as he faces renewed challenges and frustrations from his conference.
The packages unveiled on April 17 include funding for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan and other Indo-Pacific partners.
The $95 billion price tag puts it nearly evenly in line with an earlier Senate-passed foreign aid and national security package that Mr. Johnson declined to take up in the House.
Nearly $10 billion in additional funding is slated for humanitarian relief for “vulnerable populations and communities” in the Gaza Strip.
A fourth expected bill was not unveiled with these three packages.
That legislation is expected to include a revised TikTok ban—which passed the House but has stalled in the Senate—and the REPO Act, which would allow the United States to finance some of the package’s foreign aid by seizing the assets of Russian oligarchs.
The move, which is likely to enflame tensions in an already deeply divided House Republican conference, increases the likelihood that Mr. Johnson, like his predecessor Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), will face a motion to vacate.
However, with his paper-thin two-vote majority that will soon be reduced to a one-vote majority when Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) leaves later this week, the threat posed by Ms. Greene and Mr. Massie is far from an idle one.
Should Ms. Greene activate her motion to vacate against Mr. Johnson, it would all but guarantee that he would need Democratic support to keep his job.
Ms. Greene has said she’s “firmly against the plan,” which she’s decried as a “scam,” but has yet to indicate that she'll activate her motion to vacate in response to it. She has repeated on several occasions that she “[hasn’t] given a red line” on what would compel her to activate the motion.
While Democrats have yet to commit to giving Mr. Johnson the backing that he would likely need to survive such a motion, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) has indicated that it’s far from an impossibility.
“If the speaker will do the right thing and allow the House to have an up or down vote on the national security bill, I believe that there are a reasonable number of Democrats who would not want to see the speaker fall,” Mr. Jeffries said during a news conference last week.
Several Democrats, including former House Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), have said that they would protect Mr. Johnson if instructed to do so by Mr. Jeffries.
Meanwhile, House Democrats have tentatively signaled that they would back the plan.
“The important point is the substance of the legislation. The substance matters,” Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.), chairman of the Democratic Caucus, told reporters on April 16.
After the legislation was unveiled, the White House announced its support for the package.
“I strongly support this package to get critical support to Israel and Ukraine, provide desperately needed humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza, and bolster security and stability in the Indo-Pacific,” President Joe Biden said. “Israel is facing unprecedented attacks from Iran, and Ukraine is facing continued bombardment from Russia that has intensified dramatically in the last month.
“The House must pass the package this week and the Senate should quickly follow.
“I will sign this into law immediately to send a message to the world: We stand with our friends, and we won’t let Iran or Russia succeed.”
