6 months ago
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Newly elected MAGA Speaker of the House Mike Johnson had his first nationally televised interview Thursday, and unsurprisingly he chose Fox News’ Sean Hannity to conduct it. So it should also not be surprising that Johnson told Hannity what he wanted to hear on Ukraine: He’s opposed to President Joe Biden’s request for a $105 billion supplement assistance package for Ukraine and Israel.
Johnson told Hannity the “consensus among House Republicans is that we need to bifurcate those issues,” meaning the $61.4 billion in aid that would go to Ukraine has to be handled separately. A separate vote is the best chance the MAGA wing of the Republican conference has to block assistance to Ukraine, a move they might be coordinating with MAGA Senate Republicans.
Johnson did concede that it’s important for Ukraine to prevail, essentially paraphrasing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s argument. “We can’t allow Vladimir Putin to prevail in Ukraine because I don’t believe it would stop there. It would probably encourage and empower China to perhaps make a move on Taiwan. We have these concerns,” he told Hannity. Johnson met with McConnell earlier on Thursday.
Blocking Ukraine funding has been key in the ongoing MAGA fight. It derailed the defense appropriations bill for weeks until the hard-liners succeeded in getting it stripped out of the bill, and they successfully stripped it from the continuing resolution that averted a government shutdown last month.
There is good news for Ukraine funding, however, in that the hard-liners couldn’t keep the $300 million they got stripped out of the appropriations bill from getting a separate vote, and it passed overwhelmingly: 311-117. Yes, all the “no” votes were from Republicans, but 101 of them are still supportive of Ukraine.
That means Democrats who’ve been considering a discharge petition to advance Biden’s supplement request should think about getting it moving.
