House Speaker Mike Johnson unveiled the bills, focused on Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan, amid rising tension in his caucus over the issue of foreign aid.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on April 17 revealed a series of foreign aid bills totaling $95 billion that come as he faces renewed challenges and frustrations from his conference.
The packages unveiled Wednesday include funding for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan and other Indo-Pacific partners.
The $95 billion price tag puts it nearly evenly in line with an earlier Senate-passed foreign aid and national security package that Mr. Johnson declined to take up in the House.
Nearly $10 billion in additional funding is slated for humanitarian relief for vulnerable populations and communities in Israel.
A fourth expected bill was not unveiled with these three packages.
That legislation is expected to include a revised TikTok ban—which passed the House but has stalled in the Senate—and the REPO Act, which would allow the United States to finance some of the package’s foreign aid by seizing the assets of Russian oligarchs.
The move is likely to enflame tensions in an already deeply divided House Republican conference and increases the likelihood that Mr. Johnson, like his predecessor Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), will face a motion to vacate.
That’s a call that Mr. Johnson says he has no plans to heed.
However, facing a paper-thin two-vote majority that will soon be reduced to a one-vote majority when Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) leaves later this week—making it far from an idle threat.
Should Ms. Greene activate her motion to vacate against Mr. Johnson, it would all but guarantee that he would need Democratic support to keep his job.
Ms. Greene has said she’s “firmly against the plan,” which she’s decried as a “scam,” but has yet to indicate that she’ll activate her motion to vacate in response to it. Ms. Greene has repeated on several occasions that she “[hasn’t] given a red line” on what would compel her to activate the motion.
While Democrats have yet to commit to giving him the backing he would likely need to survive such a motion, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) has indicated that it’s far from an impossibility.
During a press conference last week, Mr. Jeffries said: “If the speaker will do the right thing and allow the House to have an up or down vote on the national security bill, I believe that there are a reasonable number of Democrats who would not want to see the speaker fall.”
Several Democrats, including former House Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), have said that they would protect Mr. Johnson if instructed to do so by Mr. Jeffries.
Meanwhile, House Democrats have tentatively signaled they would back the plan.
“The important point is the substance of the legislation. The substance matters,” Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.), chairman of the Democratic Caucus, told reporters on April 16.
The White House also suggested that it would back Mr. Johnson’s plan, one day after saying it opposes any stand-alone Israel-funding bill.
“The important thing is that our allies like Ukraine and Israel who are under the gun, literally under the gun, get the security assistance they need as soon as possible. So we want them to move this week,” White House national security spokesperson John Kirby told reporters on April 16.
“It does appear at first blush that the Speaker’s proposal will in fact help us get aid to Ukraine, aid to Israel, and needed resources to the Indo-Pacific for a wide range of contingencies there. At first blush it looks like that, we just want to get more details,” he added.
