Mike Johnson was faced with a stark choice: He could either worry about keeping his job as speaker of the U.S. House, or he could worry about throwing an American ally and its suffering people to a rapacious neighbor.
Happily he chose the latter in steering a foreign aid package through the House that has the far-right wing of his party calling for his head.
The $95 billion package — which had been hung up for months because of the large slice it included for Ukraine — got through the House in what has become exceedingly rare: a bipartisan vote. It is now in the Senate, where approval is expected this week.
The package is a testimony, and hopefully not a short-lived one, that Johnson is growing into a job that demands a broader viewpoint than just being one of 435 members of the House.
Before he had become speaker, Johnson, like several of his GOP colleagues, had grown tired of pumping U.S. money into the Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion. After he became speaker, he insisted that any further aid be tied to tougher immigration restrictions on the U.S. border with Mexico. Cynics claimed that Johnson did not expect Democrats to go for such a deal and that the immigration demand was really a ploy to kill aid for Ukraine. When the ploy backfired and the Senate passed a bipartisan bill linking foreign aid to an immigration crackdown, Johnson killed the deal, in part because Donald Trump did not want Congress to fix any problems on the Southern border as long as he could use it as a campaign cudgel against Joe Biden.
That’s where the impasse stood until Johnson started to listen to national security experts who told him that if Congress didn’t act soon, Ukraine would not be able to hold out much longer, that the U.S. would lose considerable trust among its other allies, and that Russia would be further empowered in its ambition to cobble back together through brute force parts of the former Soviet empire, turning back the significant inroads that democracy had made in Eastern Europe.
Abandoning Ukraine would not just put that nation back under Russian domination. It would create the likelihood of a broader conflict that might eventually require American troops to get involved. Johnson came to subscribe to the maxim that the U.S. could either give Ukraine bullets now or put American boots there later. With a son soon headed to the U.S. Naval Academy, Johnson apparently paid that warning more heed than he might have otherwise.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has become a major pain to Johnson from the far right, thinks she can make him pay for this show of bipartisanship. (The foreign aid bill on Saturday had twice as many Democrats voting for it as Republicans.) She threatens that if Johnson doesn’t voluntarily resign, she will launch the process to put his speakership up to a vote, triggering the same maneuver that last year ousted Kevin McCarthy as speaker less than nine months into his tenure.
While the threat for Johnson is real, the odds of him surviving such a challenge are better than they were for McCarthy. Last year, the Democrats were happy to sit on the sidelines and watch the Republicans destroy their own. This time, the Democrats may realize they could do a lot worse than leaving Johnson in the job. In addition, Johnson, at least for now, has Trump’s support.
Given the erratic nature of the former president, that support cannot be too comforting for Johnson. It could disappear tomorrow, especially given Trump’s oft-stated admiration for the Russian tyrant, Vladimir Putin.
If the aid for Ukraine ends up costing Johnson his job, he will leave the post knowing he did the right thing, putting this nation’s global interests over his political ones.
