Mike Johnson tries to thread a foreign aid needle

When President Joe Biden called Mike Johnson Monday night to discuss the speaker’s complex plan for moving nearly $100 billion of foreign aid through the House, he shared serious doubts.

The president argued — as Democrats have for two months now — that it would be better for the House to take up the Senate-passed bill waiting in its hopper, according to a person familiar with the conversation. If Johnson did otherwise, Biden questioned whether the Senate could process it.

“If I do the same thing as the Senate bill, I know we can’t process it,” Johnson retorted, the person said. “This is the only way forward.”

So begins the trickiest moment of Johnson’s already messy speakership. He’s proposing the House take separate votes on Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan funding, plus other provisions such as turning some aid into loans, seizing Russian assets to help Ukraine and even forcing a TikTok sale. Whatever passes would then be knitted together and sent over to the Senate as a single package.

It’s much more convoluted than the plan Biden suggested, but it also might be the only way Johnson can navigate the toxic politics of his own conference and finally deliver U.S. aid amid the spiraling crises abroad.

There are still a ton of unanswered questions not only about the contents of the legislation (which has yet to be released) but also about how — and whether — it can move through the House and Senate.

But the initial reaction is this: Parties ranging from conservative Ukraine skeptics to very senior Hill Democrats think Johnson’s plan might very well have legs.

On the right

Senior Republicans who were bracing for a hard-right meltdown have been cautiously optimistic based on the response they’ve heard so far.

“I’m still unclear on the total path forward, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be,” one senior GOP aide said.

Sure, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is blasting the plan and threatening to take down Johnson. But some Ukraine agitators have held their fire: House Freedom Caucus Chair Bob Good (R-Va.) didn’t jump down Johnson’s throat at yesterday’s closed-door leadership meeting, according to those familiar, and last night’s GOP conference meeting wasn’t especially tense, either.

The immediate question for Johnson is procedural: Setting up the intricate voting scheme he has in mind requires passing a rule, and that has been a problem lately, to say the least. Can he get this plan through the House Rules Committee and across the floor without Democratic help?

Probably not, and there are signs that the anger on the right hasn’t fully set in yet.

Case in point: After initially suggesting he was satisfied with the split-the-votes plan, Freedom Caucus Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) later blasted the idea of combining them before sending them to the Senate. Other influential voices on the right piled on late into the night. So watch this space.

On the left

Publicly, Democratic leaders who have spent weeks urging Johnson to simply pass the Senate-passed aid bill are treading carefully, with both Hakeem Jeffries in the House and Chuck Schumer in the Senate declining to weigh in until more details are released. But behind the scenes, the initial reads are positive — that it’s “basically the Senate bill broken into pieces,” as one senior Democratic aide told us last night.

If everything Johnson’s camp has shared across the aisle pans out in the text, insiders say, enough Democrats will be inclined to not only vote for passage but also pitch in on adopting the rule.

“It’s not anybody’s preferred path — it’s much more complicated than it needs to be. But everyone’s willing to play ball here,” a second Democratic aide said, adding, “We may not have another chance.”

Note that this package won’t have conditions on aid for Israel — something that has grown more popular with Democrats since the Senate package passed two months ago. But there’s an understanding that will be the price of finally securing Ukraine funding, the aides said.

The flashpoints

Optimism aside, there are plenty of land mines ahead:

— Amendment wild cards: To manage his right flank, Johnson has offered to open the bills up for at least some amendments, infusing an element of uncertainty into the entire process. It appears unlikely that border-related amendments will be germane, but expect conservatives to offer proposals to offset the spending that could repel Democrats if adopted.

Even some senior Republicans fear that an amendment free-for-all could sink the bill. But one Republican aide said a cross-party effort to protect the package from toxic add-ons could prevail.

— Border complications: Johnson is considering an unorthodox idea that Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) floated in yesterday’s conference meeting: somehow requiring the Senate to take an up-or-down vote on the House GOP’s preferred border bill, H.R. 2, before transmitting the foreign aid package.

It’s unclear if it’s even possible, but Johnson’s rank and file seem to like the idea. How it will sit with Schumer, who is trying to protect several red-state Democratic incumbents this fall, is another matter entirely.

— Aid for Gaza: There was confusion last night about whether the House package will include the $10 billion in humanitarian aid for Gaza and other troubled hot spots included in the Senate bill, which was essential for its passage in February. It was notably absent from one set of bullet points circulated yesterday.

Senior Democrats, however, believe that those funds will in fact be included based on their conversations with House GOP counterparts. If they aren’t, they could be back at square one.

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