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House Speaker Mike Johnson is facing increased pressure on Ukraine aid, and he is running out of excuses for not bringing to the floor the supplemental aid bill the Senate passed in February. He’s caught between the MAGA House Republicans and the White House, the Senate, and House Democrats, all of whom are pushing for him to stop dithering and help save Ukraine. Out of that mix, an unlikely potential savior for Johnson has emerged: GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
Graham recently met with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv, where the senator floated what he calls, “President Trump’s idea of turning aid from the United States into a no-interest, waivable loan.” That statement’s a blatant attempt to flatter Trump into thinking it’s his proposal and easing objections from the House MAGA wing, which could definitely work.
As of Tuesday, the idea is starting to take hold in the Republican Senate. The premise is to make about $12 billion of Biden’s requested $60 billion aid package a direct low- or no-interest loan. And the other $48 billion in the package would essentially stay in the U.S., going to the armaments industry that’s manufacturing the weapons that would eventually be shipped to Ukraine. It would be creating jobs and capacity for the U.S. defense, the argument goes.
So far, Democrats in the Senate aren’t biting. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois dismissed it, saying, “I also would like some waivable loans,” and Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut told Politico that it’s “one of those back-of-the-napkin ideas that sounds really good until you actually try to operationalize it.” Murphy went on to say it’s a “fool’s errand” to try to placate Trump, and “a pretty dumb idea.” However, he added, “But I’d be interested to hear more.”
The White House isn’t dismissing the idea. Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters that the solution is for the House to pass the bill it has now, which has already passed in the Senate, but she also did not say that President Joe Biden would be opposed to a loan for Ukraine.
Johnson has said he’ll turn to Ukraine aid once the government funding package has been passed, but so far, he hasn’t stopped wavering on how he’ll address it. “There’s a number of avenues that we’ve been looking at to address that,” he told reporters Wednesday. “And I’m not going to say today what that is.”
Johnson has talked about splitting the supplemental package up with separate votes for Ukraine and Israel aid, but he hasn’t done it yet. The problem with that—as with Graham’s loan idea—is that it will take even more time to finish since all the details still need to be hammered out.
As of now, Congress is scheduled to start a long Easter recess once the funding bill is passed, which suggests that the soonest the House would work on it is April 9, when the chamber returns from break. Any new proposal—either split aid bills or the loan idea—would then have to be passed by the Senate, where MAGA senators would have more opportunity to drag out the process.
Meanwhile, Democrats continue to push Johnson. “The clock is ticking, and we have to get the bipartisan national security bill over the finish line … It’s reckless to do otherwise,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries recently told reporters. “We cannot go home for Passover and Easter—we must have this assistance to Ukraine,” Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” program.
Democrats have secured 182 signatures on their discharge petition to force the Senate’s bill onto the floor, but so far, no Republican members have signed on. To succeed, the petition will need at least some Republican signatures.
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