Mike Johnson Does the Right Thing

National Review Online

Monday, April 22, 2024

 

It wasn’t pretty, but Speaker Mike Johnson finally got a $95 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan through the House. It now heads to the Senate for assured passage.

 

Johnson deserves credit for changing his mind on Ukraine funding once he acquired real responsibility as speaker and also for trying every alternative to keep his conference together before moving to pass the aid with Democratic votes as a last resort.

 

Had the Ukraine measure stayed bottled up in the House, Johnson would have borne an outsized measure of blame if an artillery-starved Ukrainian military collapsed.

 

Now, Johnson’s reward for doing the right thing will likely be a challenge to his speakership led by the MAGA agitator and noted conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene.

 

The best argument against Ukraine aid is that it is costly and depleting U.S. stocks of weapons. But it would be just as costly to bolster front-line states — as we almost certainly would feel compelled to do — if Russia were to sweep to victory in Ukraine. The legislation makes the aid, in theory, a loan, and it attempts to offset the costs with seized Russian assets.

 

As for U.S. weapons stocks, about $23 billion of the roughly $60 billion in the Ukraine portion of the bill is devoted to replenishing them, although much more needs to be done to revitalize the U.S. military–industrial base.

 

The overall package includes more than $26 billion in aid for Israel, with crucial funding to replenish its missile defenses, and more than $8 billion for Taiwan and Indo-Pacific security. In a nice additional win, the TikTok divestiture bill was added to the package. It now will be passed along with the rest of the overall bill by a Senate that had seemed reluctant to take it up.

 

One of the criticisms of Johnson from the right is that he didn’t get any border-enforcement provisions after initially insisting that they had to be paired with Ukraine funding. But once it became clear that Republicans, not unreasonably, were unwilling to take President Biden’s best offer on the border, the idea of this kind of bargain was off the table. Instead, Johnson split up the various parts of the bill for separate consideration and relied on Democratic support to pass them and the underlying procedural rule. That Johnson had to get this done with Democrats is another charge against him. It’s not his fault, though, that a segment of his party has already lost patience with assisting an ally resisting Russian aggression, or that Republicans are routinely tanking procedural rules on the House floor that used to be reliable party-line votes.

 

There are legitimate criticisms of Johnson’s speakership, but he’s presiding over a very slender majority with a handful of members who care about theatrical fights and supposed purity more than results. Just eight Republicans took out Kevin McCarthy last year, together with the entirety of the Democratic caucus. Johnson was meant to be an ideological improvement. To the contrary, since he’s had to deal with the same underlying conditions as McCarthy, he’s governed basically the same way. Greene is hoping to defenestrate him by the same means for the same alleged offenses, but Democrats are signaling they will be willing to lend Johnson enough support to preserve his speaker’s gavel.

 

It’d be better if a Republican speaker didn’t have to depend on Democratic votes to survive. That this may be the only way to avoid another chaotic, pointless speaker fight is ultimately commentary on the quality of a fraction of the GOP backbench, not of the leadership.