The House Republican Perpetual-Fiasco Machine, Continued
Maybe they'll finally pass the Ukraine/Israel bill. Maybe not. Blame...all of them.
It’s just hard to believe sometimes how bad House Republicans are at their jobs.
Take the Ukraine/Israel support bill, which the House may - finally - pass this week. Two Speakers, the radical faction, and the strong supporters of the bill have all played it badly. Very badly. With real consequences for Ukraine that most House Republicans didn’t want. And further damage to the party’s reputation.
Just to review: President Joe Biden asked for funding for Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, border operations, and other stuff back in October (adding Israel among others to an August Ukraine package). The Senate passed their version of the bill in February with a large bipartisan majority. The House hasn’t acted yet, but Speaker Mike Johnson has finally unveiled his version of the bill, which is close to what the Senate passed. Votes are expected on it on Saturday.
The basic story here is that there’s a very strong logic to must-pass bills during times of divided government.1 Eventually, the leaders of the majority party in both chambers are going to support something the president can sign, while those on the ideological fringe, especially in the out-party, will most likely oppose it. In other words, the normal outcome is going to be a compromise producing a coalition of the ideological middle against the ends.
Generally, this can work out reasonably well for almost everyone. Those who don’t want to be seen supporting the president get to vote no. Those who do get to vote yes. Party leaders (including, sometimes, the president) take the blame for giving too much in the compromise, but such is the price of leadership. And, oh yes, the must-pass bill…passes. Everybody wins!
Not with this group of House Republicans.
The biggest problem, naturally, is with the extremists, who are not willing to simply oppose the Democratic president and their less extreme colleagues, burnish their credentials as True Conservatives, and lose. Instead, they treat these things as occasions to dump their party leader - and, given the rules of the House and the narrow Republican majority, they can do exactly that. Note that they don’t use their leverage to bargain for a better bill (from their point of view); to the contrary, by making it clear that Republicans have no procedural majority, they wind up undermining their own party’s bargaining position.
But that’s not all.
When Speaker John Boehner had to deal with that kind of revolt, he did his party a huge favor: He resigned, but first he made sure that a bunch of must-pass stuff made it through the House so that everyone could blame him and not his Republican successor. Speaker Kevin McCarthy didn’t do that, even though the revolt against him was even more obviously on its way. Not only that, his foolish deal to win the office in the first place gave away the control of the Rules Committee that Speakers and their parties had used to run the House for the last sixty years. As I’m writing this Wednesday night, the Speaker’s bill can’t even make it through Rules - an unheard of event in the modern House before McCarthy made it possible.
Meanwhile, as Congress scholar Josh Huder put it about current (as of late Wednesday night at least) Speaker Johnson : “Even the most gifted legislative leaders in history would struggle with this House GOP conference. But his handling of the foreign aid bills this week is a train wreck of his own doing.” Johnson has constantly shifted direction, leaving everyone in the party upset with him.2 It didn’t help that he stalled for months, even though it’s been obvious that Ukraine aid was growing steadily less popular within the Republican Party - and aid to Israel was growing less urgent, and (as it has turned out) less popular within the Democratic Party. Not ideal for a Speaker who had concluded - I think? - that both really were must-pass.3
And then there are the Republican Ukraine/Israel hawks, who have utterly failed to use their leverage to put any pressure on Johnson and the party at all. For example: when Johnson and the radicals really wanted to pass the Mayorkas impeachment; the hawks could have withheld their necessary votes until Johnson agreed to put the Senate-passed Ukraine/Israel bill on the House floor. But no.4
In other words, the entire House Republican conference is contributing to making this as much of a fiasco as possible. And as much as it’s easy to laugh at Congressional train wrecks, this one has done real damage to the Ukraine war effort, which most of them support, and to the reputation of the United States as a reliable ally, which presumably all of them support. Even if they do manage to eventually pass the thing. Just as similar episodes from the House during this Congress over the debt limit and spending bills cost money to the US Treasury and damaged the fiscal reputation of the nation.
Not good, folks.
Must pass? Worth a whole item to itself, but for here just accept that everyone (or almost everyone, at least) thinks the consequences of not passing it are unacceptable.
Longtime Congress watchers also point out that no one likes Saturday votes (although it can have some advantages); also, attendance can be spotty, which could cause further troubles.
It’s possible that Johnson just wants the bill to fail, but it really doesn’t appear that’s the case. Also if Johnson had wanted an Israel-only bill, he might have been able to really split the Democrats had he pushed a clean version of that back in November, when instead the House passed an Israel-only bill that also included provisions Democrats couldn’t support.
They also could have openly coordinated with Democrats. Or, hey, they could have taken a page from the radicals and threatened to oust the Speaker unless he brought the Senate bill to the House floor. Lots of very reasonable hardball options have been available, and they’ve used none of them.