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House Speaker Mike Johnson splits aid to Ukraine and Israel into separate votes.
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Democrats have generally resisted that, but are now willing to go along with it.
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But progressive Democrats – who are increasingly opposed to aid to Israel – are applauding the move.
House Speaker Mike Johnson’s unconventional plan to hold separate votes on aid to Israel and Ukraine is primarily intended to appease House Republicans who are not in favor of more aid want to vote for Ukraine.
But it also draws applause from an unusual source: progressive Democrats who do not want to vote for more aid to Israel.
“I think it’s a great plan,” said Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who supports aid to Ukraine but will not vote for unconditional aid to Israel. “I think it is disastrous to give even one cent to the Israeli army without conditions at this time. It is almost immoral.”
Omar is one of nearly two dozen progressives in the House of Representatives who have refused to sign a so-called “discharge petition” to force a House vote on the $95.3 billion National Security Supplement, which was introduced in passed by the Senate in February and includes more than $60 billion for Ukraine and Ukraine. more than 14 billion dollars for Israel.
Since the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, the Biden administration, Republican Party and Democratic Senate leaders, and most Democrats in the House of Representatives have supported combining aid to Ukraine and Israel, in theory that including Israeli aid would push Republicans to approve more aid to Ukraine. Republicans, hoping to avoid having to vote together on aid to Ukraine and Israel, have made numerous attempts to separate the two.
But in the intervening months, Israel’s politics on the left have changed dramatically.
Polls have shown that large numbers of Democratic voters view Israel’s war in Gaza – which has killed nearly 34,000 Palestinians – as a genocide, while hundreds of thousands of voters have cast “unpledged” ballots in Democratic presidential primaries across the country to protest against Biden’s support. for Israel. Many Democratic lawmakers have increasingly come to the view that aid to Israel should be conditioned to prevent American weapons from being used to facilitate potential human rights abuses.
That has led some progressives to refuse to sign on to the Senate-passed bill, even though they support aid to Ukraine.
“I am against the additional measure and I do not want it to pass,” Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told Business Insider in February.
In the absence of these conditions for aid to Israel, progressive Democrats have increasingly pushed for what their Republican counterparts have long sought: separate votes.
“We pushed for it, so I’m grateful this is happening,” Omar said.
Both the aid to Israel and Ukraine — along with a bill to provide aid to Taiwan and another bill that includes a bill to force the sale of TikTok — are likely to pass. But the coalitions needed for each of these coalitions will be different: Ukraine will receive mostly Democratic support, while Israel will receive more Republican Party support.
Rep. Ro Khanna of California, another progressive Democrat who did not sign the discharge petition, noted that he has long supported the idea of single-issue bills — an idea also long favored by Republicans in the House of Representatives .
“Good for Johnson for sticking to that basic principle,” said Khanna. “Let people vote on Taiwan, let them vote on Ukraine, let them vote on Israel.”
Democrats were generally open to Johnson’s plan and may even have to help the Republican chairman with procedural steps to get it to speak. They could also ultimately protect him from an attempt by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to oust him as a result.
But that doesn’t mean they like the plan as much as progressives do.
“It’s a mind-bogglingly complicated process for something that has a simple solution,” said Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, who favors the Senate-passed bill. “How could they make the simplest thing possible complicated?”
And it remains to be seen whether the plan will make it to the floor. Far-right Republicans have only grown angrier at Johnson as the week continues, with some of them protesting a possible effort to make it harder for lawmakers to demand votes to oust the chairman.
Read the original article on Business Insider
