Sunday morning, in response for the House approving a $61 billion Ukraine aid package after months of delay, I observed,
Assuming [Speaker Mike Johnson] survives this—and it looks like he will—it may start to break the stranglehold Trump and the MAGA faction have over the party.
[…]
The fact that 112 Republicans voted against the bill—and, of course, the fact that he is again the GOP nominee for President—means that Trump is still the dominant force in the party. But 101 dared vote against him on a matter of principle. That’s a hopeful sign.
The Senate’s passage of the bill and further reporting have added ever-so-slightly to my optimism on that front.
NBC News (“McConnell says Tucker Carlson and Trump’s waffling delayed crucial Ukraine aid“):
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday celebrated the impending passage of $60 billion in U.S. aid to Ukraine ahead of a final vote, while lamenting the fact that it took months to secure enough Republican support to land it.
At a press conference, the Kentucky Republican pinpointed two men responsible for that delay: former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson and former President Donald Trump.
“The demonization of Ukraine began by Tucker Carlson, who in my opinion ended up where he should have been all along, which is interviewing Vladimir Putin,” McConnell, R-Ky., told reporters. “And so he had an enormous audience, which convinced a lot of rank and file Republicans that maybe this was a mistake.”
“I think the former president had sort of mixed views on” Ukraine aid, he added, before alluding to the failed attempt to add border security provisions to the bill, “which requires you to deal with Democrats, and then a number of our members thought it wasn’t good enough.”
“And then our nominee for president didn’t seem to want us to do anything at all,” McConnell said. “That took months to work our way through it.”
The top Senate Republican has been an ardent supporter of Ukraine aid and battled a slew of conservative voices who have sought to block it. He called the expected passage of the bill “an important day for America, and a very important day of freedom-loving countries around the world.”
[…]
McConnell, who consistently bucked loud conservative voices in his party who opposed Ukraine funding, argued that the margin of support for the war-torn country is an indication the Republican Party is tracking back to its Reaganesque roots of defending the encroachment on democracy around the world.
McConnell said he remains committed to working to help regain a Republican Senate majority, despite his plans to step back from leadership at the end of the year. He said he believes the crop of candidates the Republicans have recruited are more inclined to back away from the party’s recent isolationist tendencies.
“I think we’ve turned the corner on the isolationist movement,” McConnell said. “I’ve noticed how uncomfortable proponents of that are when you call them isolationist. So I think we’ve made some progress and I think it’s gonna have to continue because we got big, big problems: China, Russia, Iran. Going into World War II we just had Germany and Japan.”
POLITICO Magazine (“How Mike Johnson Is Taming Trump and His Party — Against All Odds“):
Confronted with sobering briefings revealing Ukraine on the brink of collapse, Speaker Mike Johnson made the leap from Benton, Louisiana (pop. 2,048) congressman to custodian of the trans-Atlantic alliance.
“It was the intelligence, it was the Europe generals who are in charge of the freedom of the world and of course it was the developments as well, everything has escalated,” Johnson told me, alluding to the conversations he had with the American brass at European Command.
If those developments, namely Ukraine running out of weapons, finally brought urgency to the speaker, his decision to call the foreign aid vote Saturday delivered a bracing dose of political clarity in Washington.
The Republican Party is drifting from its Reaganite past, but when faced with the burden of leadership, there’s still muscle memory to be found; Donald Trump is more committed to self-interest than any ideological anchorage and can be managed accordingly; and bipartisanship remains possible when bad actors are removed from the negotiating table.
It may seem hard to square the congressman who, only in September, opposed $300 million in Ukraine aid with the one who put his career on the line to deliver $61 billion to the battered country.
It’s easier to grasp when you realize Johnson grew up in the shadow of B-52s at Barksdale Air Force Base during the 1980s. He’s a Republican of the “Red Dawn” generation. It only took a higher level of intelligence briefings, granted to congressional leaders, for him to pick up that old Cold War hymnal.
Recall: While Johnson dragged his feet for months on bringing the aid bill to the floor, he changed his tune almost immediately on the concept once he became speaker. Just days after his October election to the post, Johnson told Senate Republicans he supported Ukraine funding, so long as aid to Israel received a separate vote.
I was struck by the turnaround at the time and asked a savvy House GOP aide how to explain it. “Amazing what some intel briefs will do,” the aide said.
By spring, Johnson was sounding more like Dick Cheney than Rand Paul.
“This is a projection of American strength,” Johnson said last week, adding that “we stand in the defense of freedom.”
As striking, he and other House GOP lawmakers have lately been reviving even more distinctly 2000s-era language.
Following the vote Saturday, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Johnson’s fellow Louisianan, told me the U.S. was “standing up to the evil actors around the world, there’s an axis of evil right now between Russia, Iran and China.”
Few in the House have been more aggressive than the Foreign Relations Chair, Mike McCaul of Texas, in trying to rekindle those embers.
“I keep telling my colleagues: They’re all related, man,” said McCaul. “To abandon Ukraine will only invite more aggression from Putin but also Chairman Xi in Taiwan. The ayatollah has already reared his ugly head.”
By the time I heard Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), another ardent proponent of the aid package, use the “axis of evil” phrase, I asked where this language was coming from (besides George W. Bush speechwriters).
“Spend an hour in the SCIF getting briefed,” Fitzpatrick shot back, referring to the secure facility used for classified briefings. “These are not isolated problems.”
Now, part of this effort by GOP hawks is aimed at bringing China into the conversation. That’s a strategy based on facts (Beijing is indeed sending weapons technology to Moscow) but also politics (confronting China is far more unifying among congressional Republicans).
Yet the events of the last week demonstrate that even in the House GOP there exists the same down-the-middle bifurcation as divided Senate Republicans when they voted on this package in February. For all the recent talk about a de facto coalition government between the two parties in the House, there’s effectively two parties within the GOP when it comes to Ukraine (and much else).
One-hundred and twelve House Republicans opposed the Ukraine funding while 103 supported the measure.
And, as good a vote-counter as Scalise noted, “The vast majority of our members wanted this addressed and brought up, even some that voted no wanted to bring it up.” Which is to say that some, though not all, of those “no” votes were in the vote-no-hope-yes caucus.
That’s the good news for today’s Reaganites. The bad news is they’re losing ground with every new class of Republicans. Of the 112 House GOP lawmakers who opposed the Ukraine funding, 71 have been elected since 2018, the Trump era.
[…]
The vote should not be minimized, though, particularly when taken together with what else Johnson has done of late. By keeping the government open, reauthorizing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and sending billions to Ukraine, Israel and the Indo-Pacific while forcing the sale of TikTok, he’s already become a more consequential speaker than Kevin McCarthy.
Plus, Johnson did it with an even slimmer GOP majority and, thanks to McCarthy, a non-functional Rules Committee and perpetual motion to vacate sword hanging over his speakership.
Democrats may disagree with Johnson’s brand of evangelical conservatism, but they believe he comes by it honestly — and is an honest man.
“We have not that much in common, philosophically, but if you can trust somebody to be a person of his or her word you can find common ground,” former Speaker Nancy Pelosi told me when I asked her about Johnson.
Indeed.
I know that a considerable number of the regular commenters believe that Trumpism is nothing more than Reaganism—or at least Gingrichism—unfiltered. But there’s a fundamental difference in those brands of Republicanism and MAGA. The former was largely ideological while the latter is largely nihilistic.
Pelosi hit on a big part of it: Democrats see Johnson as a honorable man who disagrees with them on policy but genuinely wants what’s best for the country. Reagan and Pelosi’s predecessor, Tip O’Neill, saw each other in the same way. Reagan’s agenda had to get through a House that had been controlled by Democrats for a generation and the two worked together to reach compromises they could both live with. While I think Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich genuinely disliked one another, they nonetheless managed to get quite a lot done by working together; whatever they thought about the other, they trusted them to keep to their agreements.
While I was a big Gingrich fan in 1994, I quickly came to see his rhetoric and tactics as bad for the country. With more perspective, I see him in many ways as the antecedent to Trump from a stylistic standpoint. But, fundamentally, he was a policy wonk who actually wanted to get bills passed.
Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and their ilk are not persuadable by little things like intelligence briefs because they really don’t care about the country. Apparently, at least half of the House Republican Caucus and a greater share of the Senate Republican Caucus, do. That’s a low bar, to be sure, but it’s something to build from.
To be clear: if Johnson were to become the baseline Congressional Republican and a Johnson-like figure were the GOP nominee rather than Trump, I’d still prefer a second Biden term, if less urgently. His views on social issues, especially, are just too extreme for me at this stage and the fact that the Supreme Court is no longer a bulwark against that changes the calculus. But a return to having two pro-democracy, pro-America parties rather than one competing to govern would be a welcome development.
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Author: James Joyner
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