Johnson took on hardline skeptics of Ukraine aid in the House as McConnell kept his conference in line through relentless focus behind closed doors.
Even behind closed doors, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has refused to allow fellow Republicans to remove their gaze from the plight of a people who have been fighting off Russian aggression for more than two years now.
As Republican senators will privately attest, the outgoing leader spends much of his speaking time during private Senate GOP caucus meetings making the moral and strategic case for aiding Ukraine — even as nationalist-populist senators within his own ranks continue to dig in their heels in opposition.
As one GOP senator put it to National Review yesterday: “He’s very consistent. This is all he cares about. At least, that’s what it appears in our caucus.”
While it’s certainly a stretch to say Ukraine is “all” McConnell “cares about,” he has pledged publicly and privately to spend his remaining time as leader “fighting back” against what he calls “the isolationist movement” in his own party. The master tactician’s relentless focus on the conflict in recent months reflects his willingness to play the long game and stick to his guns as the political winds swirl around him.
That long-game strategy certainly paid off last night, when the Senate voted overwhelmingly to pass a $95 billion, four-part national-security package that will send foreign aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. Only 15 Republican senators and three Democrats voted against the package Tuesday evening, with several GOP senators who previously opposed the measure switching their votes, including Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma.
The passage of that legislation, which President Joe Biden signed into law earlier Wednesday, marks a vindication of sorts for McConnell and traditional GOP defense hawks, who have spent months pushing long-stalled aid to Ukraine amid staunch opposition from a vocal minority of nationalist-populist Republicans in both chambers who are skeptical of overseas engagement.
For now, at least, the Reaganite consensus prevails — even if the task took longer than McConnell would have liked. “I didn’t think we could give up,” McConnell told Politico on Tuesday. “We just had to keep trying. I have kind of a specialty in long games. And this was a lot longer than it should have been.”
Pulling that national-security package across the finish line took a village.
Moved by a series of dramatic intelligence briefings, House Speaker Mike Johnson emerged as a hero among Republican defense hawks over the weekend when he successfully maneuvered the package through the lower chamber. In the end, the legislation closely mirrored the Senate supplemental that passed the upper chamber in February.
Johnson’s strategy? In a nutshell: Give members an open amendment process, turn some of the economic assistance to Kyiv into a loan, and allow members to vote their conscience on individual bills before tying it all together in a package to send to the Senate — all while under threat of his own ouster from a handful of isolationist-leaning hardliners who have long opposed sending additional aid to Ukraine.
The House is in a cooling-off period of sorts this week as members return to their districts for a much-needed recess. Not that the job stops for Johnson, who is visiting Jewish students at Columbia this afternoon and will make stops in eight states this week, according to a person familiar with the matter, as he works doggedly to hold on to his slim majority.
It’s anyone’s guess whether Johnson’s detractors will follow through next week on their threat to force a snap vote on his speakership — and whether Democrats will come to the Louisianan’s rescue if that floor vote comes to pass.
“People in the Freedom Caucus may be sympathetic to it, but also just don’t want the headache of going through the motion to vacate again,” says Tim Chapman, a senior adviser to former vice president Mike Pence’s political advocacy group, Advancing American Freedom.
A major inflection point in this motion-to-vacate saga occurred on Monday, when former president Donald Trump called Johnson a “very good person” who “stood very strongly with me on NATO.” As motion-to-vacate sponsor Marjorie Taylor Greene stands by, the GOP’s presumptive 2024 nominee threw Johnson his second lifeline in two weeks, taking the wind out of the Georgia representative’s sails.
Trump, whose foreign policy is often difficult to pin down, played a curious role in these national-security supplemental negotiations. He notably declined to immediately endorse Johnson’s plan as he continued to signal in social-media posts and public remarks that congressional leaders should consider giving aid to Ukraine in the form of a loan.
Republicans on the Hill took the hint. They amended the Ukraine portion of the House foreign-aid package to turn roughly $10 billion of economic assistance to Kyiv into a loan (that the president can forgive as soon as 2026). Two key players in that negotiating process were Republican senators Graham and Mullin, both of whom worked the phones behind the scenes to involve Trump in the process.
“We would never have gotten here if Trump hadn’t posted that, and then we immediately got on the phone with him to start talking,” Mullin told National Review Tuesday evening, speaking of Trump’s social-media posts related to the Ukraine loan. “So we’ve negotiated with him through this whole process.”
Democrats in the White House and on Capitol Hill also played a major role in pulling the foreign-aid bill across the finish line. As Politico reported today: “Biden directed his senior aides to employ a two-pronged strategy: privately make clear to Johnson the stakes for Europe and the rest of the world if Russian President Vladimir Putin claims Ukraine, leaning heavily on intelligence — and lay off attacking the new speaker.”
It’s possible that Democrats’ praise for Johnson’s resolve may soon lead to his undoing. After all, it’s not exactly in Johnson’s long-term political interest to have ex-speaker Nancy Pelosi call him “courageous” for pulling the foreign-aid package across the finish line. That said, it’s far from clear that rank-and-file Republicans — even those in the Freedom Caucus — have the appetite to go through another speakership fight just six months after Johnson’s predecessor got the boot, especially this close to a presidential election.
When National Review pressed even some anti-Ukraine-aid Republican senators on this question Tuesday afternoon, there emerged a common refrain: Who is the alternative?
“We’re now less than 200 days from the presidential election,” says Faith and Freedom Coalition Chairman Ralph Reed, one of 40 conservative leaders to sign a letter urging the House to oppose a vote on the motion to vacate. The last thing Trump and congressional Republicans need, he said, is a “chaotic, potentially multi-week drama on Capitol Hill that suggests that Republicans don’t know how to lead and can’t figure out who their leader ought to be.”
As House Republicans take a breather this week in their home districts, defense hawks in both chambers are taking a victory lap — some more publicly than others.
“I think we’ve turned the corner on the isolationist movement,” the outgoing Senate minority leader said during his Tuesday afternoon press conference, moments before twisting the knife: “I’ve noticed how uncomfortable proponents of that are when you call them isolationist.”
Around NR
• Progressive “Squad” member Summer Lee won the Democratic nomination in Pennsylvania’s twelfth congressional district on Tuesday, despite having been a vocal critic of Israel in the wake of the October 7 terrorist attacks. Caroline Downey has more:
The results of Lee’s primary contest will likely encourage fellow far-left progressives who have ramped up their criticism of Israel in recent months, over the objections of centrist Democrats who believe their hardline stance represents a political liability for President Biden.
• Trump will be busy headlining fundraisers in the coming weeks, as Audrey Fahlberg was first to report:
Over the next few weeks, the GOP’s presumptive 2024 nominee will travel to Miami, Lexington, Ky., and Las Vegas, to headline fundraisers hosted by the Trump 47 committee, the former president’s joint fundraising committee that benefits his own campaign, his Save America PAC, the Republican National Committee, and dozens of state parties. The asking price at all three events for Trump 47 fundraising status? $844,600 per donor couple.
• No matter how the 2024 presidential election ends, the reasons for either candidate’s loss are “so obvious today that the outcome, whatever it may be, will be seen as inevitable in retrospect,” writes Noah Rothman:
If Biden loses in November, one of the primary factors will be [his campaign’s] overreliance on a smaller universe of dedicated voters. If Trump loses, it will be partly attributable to his overreliance on a large population of Americans who cannot be bothered to cast a ballot. Either way, the result will be attributed to the bets both campaigns placed early in this campaign cycle. And everyone, save perhaps for the campaigns themselves, will have seen it coming.
• With much of the Kennedy family campaigning for Biden, Jim Geraghty asks, “If Kennedy is such a threat to Trump’s chances, why are so many political professionals acting as though Kennedy is a bigger threat to Biden?”
Polling indicates that Trump’s lead is a little larger (about a percentage point) when Kennedy, Jill Stein, and Cornel West are added as options. Kennedy picked a progressive Democratic donor, Nicole Shanahan, as his running mate. Allies of President Joe Biden are digging into Shanahan’s personal life. And allies of Donald Trump intend to tout Kennedy’s record to disaffected Democrats. And now many members of the Kennedy family feel the need to tell Americans to vote for the Democrat, not to vote for the guy named Kennedy.
• The presidential elections of both 1892 and 2024 seem to raise the same question: “What if you kept holding the same election until everybody was sick of it?” Dan McLaughlin looks at Grover Cleveland’s 1892 defeat of his Republican opponent, Benjamin Harrison, as “our only real historical parallel for 2024.”
The outcome reflects how an electorate responds when a stale, rejected plurality candidate is offered as the only alternative to an unpopular incumbent. Voters ousted Harrison, but without much enthusiasm. In 1876, 81.6 percent of the country’s eligible voters turned out and backed one of the two major-party candidates.
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