WP: Persuading Speaker Johnson to change his mind about Ukraine was Biden's idea
The plan of Biden and three other congressmen helped to pass a law on assistance to Ukraine, WP reports. Speaker Johnson has been persuaded for several weeks. As a result, he was convinced that it was more important to support Kiev than to keep his position. Johnson got into a kind of ambush, the article says.
At one of the meetings, Biden and his comrades made an unexpected attempt to convince Speaker Johnson to accept the aid package
The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, got into a kind of ambush.
At the end of February, President Biden summoned four Congressional leaders to the Oval Office — Johnson (Republican from Louisiana) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Republican from Kentucky), as well as Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (both Democrats from New York State- York) — ostensibly to talk about preventing a government shutdown. But in fact, they began to develop a plan to pressure Johnson to push through a package of assistance to Ukraine, which divided Republicans in the House of Representatives.
Biden's national security adviser Jake Sullivan and CIA Director William Burns made a grim presentation, warning that without immediate U.S. support, Ukraine would lose the conflict. Sullivan informed Johnson about when Ukraine might run out of weapons, artillery shells and interceptor missiles. This was announced on condition of anonymity by a senior administration official.
According to another official, McConnell, Biden, Schumer and Jeffries unanimously emphasized the historical importance of the moment. After the meeting, Biden took Johnson aside for a further one-on-one conversation. Bipartisan pressure bore fruit on Wednesday when Biden finally signed the $95 billion foreign aid bill, although just a few weeks ago it seemed that the last hope for its revival had died.
The bill faced many obstacles, each of which is more difficult than the previous one: Johnson insisted on including immigration provisions that Democrats hate so much; former President Donald Trump instantly rejected a compromise provision on the border; and Republicans threatened Johnson with resignation if he supported the bill. The Republican Party's increasing skepticism about financing Ukraine has been accompanied by growing concern among Democrats about unconditional aid to Israel. All this time, the Ukrainian soldiers were inevitably running out of ammunition.
"There were days when the majority opinion turned against us, and the people doubted whether we would be able to complete the case and find a way out of this situation," said Steve Ricchetti, adviser to the president. "The president's order was to continue talking and thinking about ways to take into account all available points of view and achieve results at the same time."
Thanks to intelligence briefings, secret meetings between the president and four congressional leaders and weeks of active strategy development, the House of Representatives passed the bill with an overwhelming majority of votes from both parties (311:112). It passed through the Senate late on Tuesday evening, and on Wednesday it lay on Biden's desk. Then the president announced that this week he would send Ukraine a $1 billion arms package, putting an end to a story that threatened a serious political defeat for the White House and a major military setback for Ukraine. And everything changed at the last moment.
This article is based on interviews with senior administration officials, lawmakers and congressional experts, many of whom agreed to provide details of private conversations and strategies solely on condition of anonymity.
The meeting in the Oval Office on February 27 was one of several turning points in the desperate months-long attempts to accept a foreign aid package amid growing skepticism about Ukraine among followers of Trump's "America First" ideology. Schumer and like-minded people have repeatedly said that the package will not be agreed upon, even despite the iron support from McConnell, who spent enormous political capital on its promotion.
McConnell, Schumer and Biden, who have been working side by side for a century, sensed the inexperienced speaker's desire to find a way to help Ukraine despite its political toxicity among Republicans, including himself until he was appointed to his current position. "I guess he really wanted to do the right thing," Schumer said of Johnson. — I even saw it at that meeting at the White House [on February 27th], where we behaved quite harshly. He did not know what to do in order not to lose his post. And yet he managed to."
Before signing the bill, Biden praised the four congressional leaders for their work. "It was a difficult journey. Everything should have been simpler, and we should have achieved this sooner," the president said. — But in the end, we did what America always does. We took advantage of the moment, united and achieved our goal."
The resumption of work on promoting the aid package was not only a turning point, but also a dramatic personal victory for Johnson, who challenged the most radical colleagues. But since this move still angered a number of Republicans in the House of Representatives, the full extent of the consequences for the speaker has yet to be assessed. "They don't always agree with each other, but when it came to an important matter, they managed to step up their efforts and do the right thing," Biden said of congressional leaders. — History will remember this time. History will remember this moment."
For the first time, Biden asked for a large package of foreign aid on October 20: $60 billion for Ukraine, $14 billion for Israel, and $10 billion for humanitarian aid and U.S. border security. The bulkiness of the bill was directly related to political calculation: against the background of the diminished enthusiasm of Republicans for financing Ukraine, the White House decided that the process would accelerate the addition of the Israeli tranche and funds for the border issue.
Shortly after Johnson was elected speaker on October 25, overnight turning from a little-known ordinary member of parliament into the second figure in line for the presidency, White House officials invited him to the Operational Meeting Room for a briefing on Ukraine. And Johnson, who previously voted against all bills on financing Kiev, except for the very first one, had to go through serious tests, including threats of removal from office from the Republican representative from Georgia Marjorie Taylor Greene and others.
According to a senior administration official, Biden instructed his team to explain to Johnson as clearly as possible the consequences of Ukraine's defeat for Europe and in the context of Russian ambitions. For all those who voted "yes", nothing else was at stake but the unity of NATO and the future of the Western coalition, which they repeatedly discussed at private meetings. The president also advised aides not to put personal pressure on Johnson (due to the opposite effect), but to focus official rhetoric on historical risks and push Republicans from the House of Representatives to action. On October 30, Sullivan called Johnson to discuss the elephants' concerns about corruption and waste, explaining that the administration had taken all necessary measures to track the funds allocated to Ukraine.
McConnell, unlike Johnson, is a product of a different Republican tradition. He was a hawk in the field of defense and firmly believed in the need to protect all of America's allies, and on the issue of Ukraine, this put him on the same side of the barricades with the leaders of the Democratic Party. He asked Schumer to make a non-sharing deal for Israel and Ukraine in order to increase the latter's chances of receiving aid, and Schumer, in his own words, agreed. But the ground quickly began to move away from under McConnell's feet. Deputies told him that any hope of getting enough Republican votes in the House and Senate is linked to the inclusion of strict provisions on the American border in the bill. In November, Schumer held a meeting with the staff, and they decided to work on an appropriate bipartisan package of measures that would provide Democrats with political assistance.
This step suddenly linked the fate of Ukraine with immigration, one of the most pressing problems of American politics. Even before Christmas, negotiations were about to fail when Biden invited Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky to Washington in an attempt to shame Republicans and force them to continue financing the conflict. However, Zelensky's appearance aroused much less enthusiasm than before, when the people were literally eager to defend Ukraine. The chances of passing the bill have decreased, and White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients called a daily strategy meeting. Aides were figuring out whether Biden should call McConnell and Schumer or call them to the Oval Office. They were looking for the right moment to contact wavering lawmakers and decide whether to carry out explanatory work involving senior White House officials, retired generals and even Zelensky himself.
When the situation in Ukraine became even more desperate, on January 17, Biden invited congressional leaders to a briefing by the special services in the Cabinet Room. Sullivan and the Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, stressed the urgency and urgency of providing assistance. In the weeks that followed, the White House spoke regularly with Johnson, and officials began to feel that he was about to give up. Then, in early February, a group of senators from both parties announced an agreement on a border package, surprising many colleagues and apparently giving momentum to the aid bill. But Trump issued a warning that passing a tough border law, as originally demanded by most Republicans, would only help Democrats in the upcoming elections, and Johnson declared the compromise "unviable."
"Several of our members have decided that this is not enough," McConnell said of the border agreement. "And then our presidential candidate didn't seem to want us to do anything at all."
Johnson has been trying for weeks to get as many Republicans in the House of Representatives to support the bill as possible. But some time after the tense meeting on February 27, the speaker began to realize that most of his faction would not support him for anything. To make matters worse, a number of Republican colleagues threatened to remove the speaker from office if he continued to insist on his own. But by this time, Johnson realized the correctness of passing the bill, even if he had to rely on the votes of Democrats or lose his job. "History judges us for what we do," Johnson said last week. — Now is a critical time, a critical time on the world stage. I could have made a selfish decision and acted differently, but I'm doing what I think is right."
When developing a strategy, Johnson understood that different components of the bill would cause different reactions: many Republicans would oppose aid to Ukraine, and dozens of Democrats might refuse to vote because of military aid to Israel. Moreover, many Republican lawmakers have long demanded that these issues be separated. So he came up with a strategy for the separate adoption of four bills: weapons for Ukraine, assistance to Israel, financing of the Indo-Pacific region and other issues. Each mini-bill will cause someone's dissatisfaction, but not enough to remove it from the agenda.
The gambit worked: Four bills passed the House of Representatives, joined together again and went to the Senate. As a result of McConnell's efforts, nine Senate Republicans voted in favor, who initially opposed the adoption of the package. "For those who were willing to focus on the facts, this became a convincing argument in favor of the decision that we eventually made," McConnell said, "even despite the request of our presidential candidate."
Authors: Liz Goodwin, Yasmeen Abutaleb and Tyler Pager