House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) announced Monday a path forward for legislation to support Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.
Following Iran’s attack against Israel over the weekend, Johnson met with Republican colleagues Monday night and informed them of his plan to have the chamber pass three separate bills for aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.
“What we’ll do is bring to the house floor independent measures, we won’t be voting on the senate supplemental in its current form, but we will vote on each of these measures separately in four different pieces,”Johnson said.
“We will vote on the Israel aid, on the aid to Ukraine, on the aid to the Indo-Pacific, and then another measure that has our national security priorities included.”
The fourth bill would incorporate policies from the REPO Act, a bill that would enable the U.S. to seize Russian assets, a lend-lease option for Ukraine funding, and additional sanctions against Iran, Johnson announced.
House legislation designed to facilitate the divesture of TikTok from Chinese company ByteDance will also be part of the fourth piece of legislation, Punchbowl news first reported. The chamber passed TikTok divestiture legislation last month with overwhelming bipartisan support owing to national-security concerns about ByteDance’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
Members will have 72 hours to review the legislation after potentially receiving the bill text on Tuesday morning, setting up possible votes on Friday evening.
The roadmap that Johnson laid out follows renewed bipartisan pressure to consider the $95 billion national-security supplemental passed by the Senate in February with aid for all three U.S. allies in one package. GOP leadership promised a vote on Israel aid shortly after Iran launched a barrage of missiles and drones against the Jewish state on Saturday. Israel successfully defended itself against the Iranian attack with help from the U.S., U.K., France, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.
House Republicans could face significant opposition from the party’s right flank on Ukraine aid, and Democrats will likely see similar opposition to Israel aid from progressive members. Progressive activists demonstrated across the country on Monday and shut down multiple urban thoroughfares and highways to express opposition to U.S. support for Israel.
The hard-Right and far-Left came together last week, over privacy concerns, to fight Republican and Democratic national-security hawks on renewing section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Section 702 of FISA exists to allow intelligence officials to monitor foreign threats without obtaining a warrant, but Americans can be caught in section 702 queries during the surveillance process. House lawmakers ended up passing FISA reauthorization, and the legislation is expected to pass the Senate this week before section 702 expires this upcoming Friday.
Johnson dismissed the possibility of his Republican colleagues pushing a motion to vacate him from the speakership for pushing Ukraine aid. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) has floated the motion to vacate because of conservative hardliners’ growing dissatisfaction with Johnson.