The Speaker (finally) makes his move

And risks his job

The dam just burst in Congress, and it might be the start of a new fight for the speakership.

We’ve been waiting for months for a bunch of big votes to happen. The Speaker has been putting them off because the biggest one is Ukraine.

The reason Ukraine is the biggest vote is because so much can be tied to it, so everything hinges on how the Speaker decides to handle it.

For several weeks, the Speaker has been publicly saying that he wants to pass a bill to support Ukraine, but his right-flank is strongly opposed. They’ve made it clear that if he allows a vote on Ukraine, they’ll probably try to fire him, as they did the previous Speaker.

So for months, he’s been trying to find a way to play political chess with this, floating different plans about tying Ukraine to other bills in order to gain the approval of his right-flank. But he hasn’t been able to find a plan that appeases them, so he’s just had a frozen chessboard all year.

In the meantime, he’s been trying to give his right-flank wins in other areas in order to build goodwill with them. I’d say he’s been mostly unsuccessful with that. He’s given them as much as he realistically could, but he’s also had to say no to them a couple of times. Going into this vote, I’d say his stock with them is already pretty low.

But his delay strategy finally ran out of time once it became clear that the situation in Ukraine is now desperate. I’m on the Armed Services Committee and last week our top military leadership candidly informed us that we could either immediately re-supply Ukraine with its two top needs from us - which are 1) artillery to keep the Russian army from advancing, and 2) air defense interceptors to keep the Russian air force largely on the ground - or we could watch as Russia makes major gains in Ukraine.

So the Speaker decided he was out of time for political chess - and the way he was going to deal with this situation was to move all his pieces at once.

Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel, a bunch of national security bills - he announced that he was calling all of them for a vote this week, and holding us until Saturday to get it done. As I write this, I’m getting ready to walk over to the Capitol and take the procedural vote that will allow us to bring all of those votes to the floor tomorrow afternoon.

The Speaker drafted these bills in consultation with the Senate and the White House to make sure everyone was on the same page. Unlike many of our votes, the Speaker decided that the purpose of these bills is to actually become law, so that means he needed to reach an agreement on their content before their passage.

That’s also why the Speaker is only allowing a few amendments. He knows if he allows anyone to offer any amendment, there’s a good chance that some poison pills will get tacked onto these bills and make them dead-on-arrival in the Senate, and as far as he’s concerned that would defeat the whole purpose.

These bills are very similar to the bipartisan package that passed the Senate a few months ago. Basically, the Speaker broke that package into its main pieces and is calling votes on those pieces separately. Why? Because his right-flank would go ballistic if he just passed the Senate bill. It would look like the House was doing the bidding of the Senate, which is controlled by the other party. So the structure here is mainly for optics. All the more so when you realize that, after we vote on these bills individually, we’re combining them into one and sending that over to the Senate, so they can pass all of them with one vote.

There was almost one big addition to this package: a bill addressing the southern border. The Speaker announced that he was going to include that, only to have his right-flank come out against it and force him to withdraw it. Why’d they come out against it? Because they said it wouldn’t pass the Senate - but that’s a strange thing to say when a bill addressing the southern border just passed the Senate a few months ago.

Assuming all of these bills pass and become law within the next few days, the next big question will be whether the right-flank will actually try to fire the Speaker. They are certainly beyond furious with him. One of them stood up in a meeting this week and told the Speaker to his face that he needs to resign and if he doesn’t he’ll be fired. 

“But Jeff, can’t the minority party use their votes to save the Speaker?”

Powder is being kept dry right now. The general thinking is, “Let’s see if he actually goes through with passing these bills, and then we can have that conversation.”

There’s going to be a lot to report over the next couple of weeks. It feels like the Speaker just lit all his fireworks at once. Things are about to get hectic.

That’s the latest. No campaign update this week, but I certainly appreciate your support which you can provide here (ActBlue) or here (non-ActBlue).

Best,

Jeff