Tamara Keith and Andrew Desiderio on Ukraine aid and the turmoil around Speaker Johnson

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• Geoff Bennett:

  Few things in Washington are ever easy. That was certainly true for foreign aid for Ukraine and Israel.

  After months of debate and political gamesmanship, a bipartisan majority in the House passed four bills worth $95 billion over the weekend. The Senate is expected to vote this week. But the turmoil has put Speaker Mike Johnson in the hot seat with some Republicans.

  For the political stakes, we are joined tonight by Tamara Keith of NPR and Andrew Desiderio of Punchbowl News. Amy Walter is away.

  It's great to see you both.

  So, after much delay in GOP infighting, the House passed the foreign aid bill on Saturday, lots of money for Israel, Taiwan, $61 billion for Ukraine.

  Andrew, how did Speaker Johnson come to embrace aid for Ukraine and defy his right flank? How did he get to yes?

• Andrew Desiderio, Punchbowl News:

  It's quite the 180 that he exhibited over the last year or so.

  This was a guy who embedded himself with the Republican Study Committee, the Freedom Caucus throughout his entire tenure in the House of Representatives, voted consistently against every single Ukraine package that came up since the start of the war in 2022, yet is now putting his speakership on the line over this issue.

  He's credited a couple of things with this sort of transform — transformation — excuse me — if you will. The first is the fact that he's receiving high-level intelligence briefings that he didn't receive as a rank-and-file member of the House of Representatives. When you're the speaker, you're part of what's called the Gang of Eight, so you get basically the same intel briefings that the president gets, right?

  And so that was sort of impressed upon him, the stakes of the war in Ukraine and what would happen if the United States does not send these weapons and this funding to Ukraine. The second thing is, he talked personally about his own son about to start at the U.S. Naval Academy.

  And one of the arguments for aiding Ukraine is that we're not putting American boots on the ground, right? And you heard Speaker Johnson say when he was giving his press conference on Saturday, I'd rather American bullets than American boys go to Ukraine. And I think that was a very personal element for him of this as well.

  And you just saw that play out over the weekend, to the point where, again, this is a guy who went from outright opposing Ukraine aid to basically being the one who could influence the tide of this war by deciding to bring this aid package to the floor and having it passed.

• Geoff Bennett:

  And, Tam, how does the White House view all of this being split up into individual bills? And is there anything that could threaten the expected passage in the Senate as early as tomorrow?

• Tamara Keith, National Public Radio:

  Right.

  As long as this gets to the president's desk, the White House is quite happy to have this, what ultimately will be a package, because, in essence, this is what President Biden has been asking for, for a very long time. There aren't poison pills in there. There isn't — he isn't being jammed.

  This is what the president was asking for. For months and months, we would ask the White House, what is your plan? How are you going to get this through the House? And their response, they were fairly restrained in their response, and they just repeated this refrain that if it got a vote, it would get bipartisan support. It would pass with bipartisan support.

  It was like a mantra. And, ultimately, that's exactly what happened. Not expecting — I mean, there certainly could be some drama in the Senate, but ultimately expecting that this probably will get to the president's desk and will become law and everything that that involves.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Yes.

  And one thing that gets a lot less attention is the TikTok bill. What's the deal with that, this bill that requires new ownership for TikTok over the course of the next year? If not, it would be outright banned in the U.S.

• Andrew Desiderio:

  Right. The House of Representatives cobbled together this bill kind of at the last minute a couple months back, and it basically ignited this big lobbying effort by TikTok and by their allies as well.

  Basically, what it does is, it gives TikTok one year to divest from ByteDance, which is the Chinese parent company that controls it. And if they do not divest within a year, then the app itself would be banned in the United States.

  And you had a very interesting cross-section of Democrats and Republicans both for and against this bill. It cleared the House easily. It got around 350 votes. It never got a vote in the Senate, but Mike Johnson's decision to include this bill in the foreign aid package is what is ultimately going to get it signed into law by President Biden, who has said he supports this bill.

  But, of course, there's that element of politics, where he's got a huge chunk of his base that lives on TikTok. People make money on TikTok. People have their — sort of their livelihoods on TikTok. And so the consequences, I think, are going to be talked about more once we get past the initial fervor of the foreign aid, which is obviously the highlight of this package.

• Geoff Bennett:

  And, Tam, the Biden campaign, they court TikTok influencers. I believe the campaign has a presence on TikTok.

• Tamara Keith:

  Yes, the campaign announced with some fanfare that they were creating an account on TikTok and they are very actively courting young voters and TikTok voters and, as you say, working with influencers and others.

  At the same time, though, the president has said that he will sign this legislation. Interestingly, today, former President Donald Trump went out on TRUTH Social and essentially said, hey, young voters, do you have any idea what Joe Biden might sign, what — this is happening?

  Former President Trump had also himself as president signed a ban on TikTok in the U.S. So it's a bit of a flip-flop, but Trump trying to find a wedge.

• Geoff Bennett:

  And what does the weekend passage of this legislation in the House, Andrew, mean for Speaker Johnson's job? Does this make the motion to vacate that Marjorie Taylor Greene, the congresswoman from Georgia, introduced,does this make this more of a threat?

• Andrew Desiderio:

  Let's just say at the outset the longer this hangs out there as an issue that's being talked about, the more Marjorie Taylor Greene benefits from it, not just from the attention, but also from the fund-raising as well. So I think that is an important element of this as well.

  But what you're going to have basically is, when and if she does go forward with this, leadership is going to do what's called a motion to table the motion to vacate, which means you're voting on whether to kill it or not. That will put Democrats on the spot.

  For Democrats to say, OK, this is not me voting for Mike Johnson or voting for Hakeem Jeffries, this is me voting to dispense with something that would ultimately force the ouster of Mike Johnson, right? That can be viewed a bunch of different ways if you're Marjorie Taylor Greene, right?

  If Democrats help the majority of Republicans kill that effort, then Marjorie Taylor Greene can essentially say Mike Johnson serves at the pleasure of the Democratic Party, right? And that advances her whole argument, which is that Johnson has caved to Democrats on too many things.

  And then, for Democrats, it's a question of, Hakeem Jeffries is not going to be the speaker of the House. Do you really want to cause more chaos in the House of Representatives, have this weeks-long speaker fight that we had late last year, when Kevin McCarthy was ousted?

  Some of — for some of them, the answer might be yes, because of the political benefit that comes from it. But you already have a number of Democrats who are on the record saying that they would vote for this motion to table the motion to vacate. I know that's a lot of congressional jargon.

  (Laughter)

• Andrew Desiderio:

  But it's basically you're voting on whether to kill it outright.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Got it.

  And, Tam, look, you can argue that the divisions within the House GOP Conference have never been this evident. Listen to what Texas Congressman Tony Gonzales said on CNN yesterday.

• Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX):

  The House is a rough and rowdy place, but Mike Johnson is going to be just fine. I served 20 years in the military. It's my absolute honor to be in Congress, but I serve with some real scumbags.

  Look, Matt Gaetz, he paid minors to have sex with them at drug parties. Bob Good endorsed my opponent, a known neo-Nazi. These people used to walk around with white hoods at night. Now they're walking around with white hoods in the daytime.

• Geoff Bennett:

  So, I mean, that frustration is out in the clear open.

• Tamara Keith:

  That is a stunning series of statements to make, for a member of Congress to make.

  The sort of chummy club of Congress is not a chummy, friendly place right now. And it is actually an extremely toxic environment, which is why you have seen several, especially on the Republican side, members of Congress leave before their terms were up, and at pretty inconvenient times for the rest of the Republican Conference.

• Geoff Bennett:

  And, Andrew, you mentioned Democrats potentially stepping in to save Speaker Johnson's job. I wonder if you can contextualize what we heard from California Congressman Ro Khanna yesterday.

• Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA):

  I'm a progressive Democrat, and I think you would have a few progressive Democrats doing that. And I disagree with Speaker Johnson on many issues and have been very critical of him, but he did the right thing here and he deserves to keep his job until the end of this term.

  I don't think everything in politics needs to be transactional. I think here you have Speaker Johnson, who not only put this up for a vote, but he also separated the bills, which I thought was courageous.

• Geoff Bennett:

  So that could be a real possibility, Democrats stepping into the gap there.

• Andrew Desiderio:

  Yes, it could.

  You already have a number of Democrats on the record saying that they would do this, and that would presumably make up for the number, the small number of Republicans who would vote for this motion to vacate effort.

  But look, you heard him say it there. Mike Johnson, in their view, did the right thing and he deserves to be rewarded for that, right? You don't hear that often in politics, especially from a member of the opposite party. One of the reasons why Democrats decided to band together with this effort to oust McCarthy was because, in their view, they couldn't trust him, and they didn't think he would do the right thing on Ukraine, on appropriations, on any issue, you name it, right?

  They just saw Mike Johnson do what they believe is the right thing, and, as a result, this is going to likely be an effort that Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader, blesses, even if he himself doesn't vote to kill the motion to vacate.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Andrew Desiderio, Tamara Keith, great conversation. We appreciate it. Thanks.

• Tamara Keith:

  Thank you.

• Andrew Desiderio:

  Thank you.