A Return of National Security Republicans?
Several glimmers of hope from the Ukraine funding bill.
Sunday morning, in response for the House approving a $61 billion Ukraine aid package after months of delay, I observed,
Assuming [Speaker Mike Johnson] survives this—and it looks like he will—it may start to break the stranglehold Trump and the MAGA faction have over the party.
[…]
The fact that 112 Republicans voted against the bill—and, of course, the fact that he is again the GOP nominee for President—means that Trump is still the dominant force in the party. But 101 dared vote against him on a matter of principle. That’s a hopeful sign.
The Senate’s passage of the bill and further reporting have added ever-so-slightly to my optimism on that front.
NBC News (“McConnell says Tucker Carlson and Trump’s waffling delayed crucial Ukraine aid“):
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday celebrated the impending passage of $60 billion in U.S. aid to Ukraine ahead of a final vote, while lamenting the fact that it took months to secure enough Republican support to land it.
At a press conference, the Kentucky Republican pinpointed two men responsible for that delay: former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson and former President Donald Trump.
“The demonization of Ukraine began by Tucker Carlson, who in my opinion ended up where he should have been all along, which is interviewing Vladimir Putin,” McConnell, R-Ky., told reporters. “And so he had an enormous audience, which convinced a lot of rank and file Republicans that maybe this was a mistake.”
“I think the former president had sort of mixed views on” Ukraine aid, he added, before alluding to the failed attempt to add border security provisions to the bill, “which requires you to deal with Democrats, and then a number of our members thought it wasn’t good enough.”
“And then our nominee for president didn’t seem to want us to do anything at all,” McConnell said. “That took months to work our way through it.”
The top Senate Republican has been an ardent supporter of Ukraine aid and battled a slew of conservative voices who have sought to block it. He called the expected passage of the bill “an important day for America, and a very important day of freedom-loving countries around the world.”
[…]
McConnell, who consistently bucked loud conservative voices in his party who opposed Ukraine funding, argued that the margin of support for the war-torn country is an indication the Republican Party is tracking back to its Reaganesque roots of defending the encroachment on democracy around the world.
McConnell said he remains committed to working to help regain a Republican Senate majority, despite his plans to step back from leadership at the end of the year. He said he believes the crop of candidates the Republicans have recruited are more inclined to back away from the party’s recent isolationist tendencies.
“I think we’ve turned the corner on the isolationist movement,” McConnell said. “I’ve noticed how uncomfortable proponents of that are when you call them isolationist. So I think we’ve made some progress and I think it’s gonna have to continue because we got big, big problems: China, Russia, Iran. Going into World War II we just had Germany and Japan.”
POLITICO Magazine (“How Mike Johnson Is Taming Trump and His Party — Against All Odds“):
Confronted with sobering briefings revealing Ukraine on the brink of collapse, Speaker Mike Johnson made the leap from Benton, Louisiana (pop. 2,048) congressman to custodian of the trans-Atlantic alliance.
“It was the intelligence, it was the Europe generals who are in charge of the freedom of the world and of course it was the developments as well, everything has escalated,” Johnson told me, alluding to the conversations he had with the American brass at European Command.
If those developments, namely Ukraine running out of weapons, finally brought urgency to the speaker, his decision to call the foreign aid vote Saturday delivered a bracing dose of political clarity in Washington.
The Republican Party is drifting from its Reaganite past, but when faced with the burden of leadership, there’s still muscle memory to be found; Donald Trump is more committed to self-interest than any ideological anchorage and can be managed accordingly; and bipartisanship remains possible when bad actors are removed from the negotiating table.
It may seem hard to square the congressman who, only in September, opposed $300 million in Ukraine aid with the one who put his career on the line to deliver $61 billion to the battered country.
It’s easier to grasp when you realize Johnson grew up in the shadow of B-52s at Barksdale Air Force Base during the 1980s. He’s a Republican of the “Red Dawn” generation. It only took a higher level of intelligence briefings, granted to congressional leaders, for him to pick up that old Cold War hymnal.
Recall: While Johnson dragged his feet for months on bringing the aid bill to the floor, he changed his tune almost immediately on the concept once he became speaker. Just days after his October election to the post, Johnson told Senate Republicans he supported Ukraine funding, so long as aid to Israel received a separate vote.
I was struck by the turnaround at the time and asked a savvy House GOP aide how to explain it. “Amazing what some intel briefs will do,” the aide said.
By spring, Johnson was sounding more like Dick Cheney than Rand Paul.
“This is a projection of American strength,” Johnson said last week, adding that “we stand in the defense of freedom.”
As striking, he and other House GOP lawmakers have lately been reviving even more distinctly 2000s-era language.
Following the vote Saturday, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Johnson’s fellow Louisianan, told me the U.S. was “standing up to the evil actors around the world, there’s an axis of evil right now between Russia, Iran and China.”
Few in the House have been more aggressive than the Foreign Relations Chair, Mike McCaul of Texas, in trying to rekindle those embers.
“I keep telling my colleagues: They’re all related, man,” said McCaul. “To abandon Ukraine will only invite more aggression from Putin but also Chairman Xi in Taiwan. The ayatollah has already reared his ugly head.”
By the time I heard Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), another ardent proponent of the aid package, use the “axis of evil” phrase, I asked where this language was coming from (besides George W. Bush speechwriters).
“Spend an hour in the SCIF getting briefed,” Fitzpatrick shot back, referring to the secure facility used for classified briefings. “These are not isolated problems.”
Now, part of this effort by GOP hawks is aimed at bringing China into the conversation. That’s a strategy based on facts (Beijing is indeed sending weapons technology to Moscow) but also politics (confronting China is far more unifying among congressional Republicans).
Yet the events of the last week demonstrate that even in the House GOP there exists the same down-the-middle bifurcation as divided Senate Republicans when they voted on this package in February. For all the recent talk about a de facto coalition government between the two parties in the House, there’s effectively two parties within the GOP when it comes to Ukraine (and much else).
One-hundred and twelve House Republicans opposed the Ukraine funding while 103 supported the measure.
And, as good a vote-counter as Scalise noted, “The vast majority of our members wanted this addressed and brought up, even some that voted no wanted to bring it up.” Which is to say that some, though not all, of those “no” votes were in the vote-no-hope-yes caucus.
That’s the good news for today’s Reaganites. The bad news is they’re losing ground with every new class of Republicans. Of the 112 House GOP lawmakers who opposed the Ukraine funding, 71 have been elected since 2018, the Trump era.
[…]
The vote should not be minimized, though, particularly when taken together with what else Johnson has done of late. By keeping the government open, reauthorizing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and sending billions to Ukraine, Israel and the Indo-Pacific while forcing the sale of TikTok, he’s already become a more consequential speaker than Kevin McCarthy.
Plus, Johnson did it with an even slimmer GOP majority and, thanks to McCarthy, a non-functional Rules Committee and perpetual motion to vacate sword hanging over his speakership.
Democrats may disagree with Johnson’s brand of evangelical conservatism, but they believe he comes by it honestly — and is an honest man.
“We have not that much in common, philosophically, but if you can trust somebody to be a person of his or her word you can find common ground,” former Speaker Nancy Pelosi told me when I asked her about Johnson.
Indeed.
I know that a considerable number of the regular commenters believe that Trumpism is nothing more than Reaganism—or at least Gingrichism—unfiltered. But there’s a fundamental difference in those brands of Republicanism and MAGA. The former was largely ideological while the latter is largely nihilistic.
Pelosi hit on a big part of it: Democrats see Johnson as a honorable man who disagrees with them on policy but genuinely wants what’s best for the country. Reagan and Pelosi’s predecessor, Tip O’Neill, saw each other in the same way. Reagan’s agenda had to get through a House that had been controlled by Democrats for a generation and the two worked together to reach compromises they could both live with. While I think Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich genuinely disliked one another, they nonetheless managed to get quite a lot done by working together; whatever they thought about the other, they trusted them to keep to their agreements.
While I was a big Gingrich fan in 1994, I quickly came to see his rhetoric and tactics as bad for the country. With more perspective, I see him in many ways as the antecedent to Trump from a stylistic standpoint. But, fundamentally, he was a policy wonk who actually wanted to get bills passed.
Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and their ilk are not persuadable by little things like intelligence briefs because they really don’t care about the country. Apparently, at least half of the House Republican Caucus and a greater share of the Senate Republican Caucus, do. That’s a low bar, to be sure, but it’s something to build from.
To be clear: if Johnson were to become the baseline Congressional Republican and a Johnson-like figure were the GOP nominee rather than Trump, I’d still prefer a second Biden term, if less urgently. His views on social issues, especially, are just too extreme for me at this stage and the fact that the Supreme Court is no longer a bulwark against that changes the calculus. But a return to having two pro-democracy, pro-America parties rather than one competing to govern would be a welcome development.
Indeed.
May one be cynical enough to note that as long as there are defense industry lobbyists there will be national security Republicans? And that their existence is not an unalloyed good. They brought us Iraq and Afghanistan. And as one who has frequently said in these threads, “It ain’t just Trump.” let me add some nuance. It’s not that Trump is no different than Reagan and Gingrich. It’s that Reagan and Gingrich helped put us on the slope that produced Trump.
Over at LGM Paul Campos says,
The three being:
1. Trump’s affect in his trial, hardly a strongman appearance.
2. His appeals for money and demonstrations are becoming more desperate as they are failing.
3. Last night Nikki Haley, who withdrew almost two months ago, got 17% of the PA GOP primary vote.
Hopefully the House vote and McConnell’s advocacy indicate that people with more sensitive political wind vanes than mine, and better data, no longer fear Trumpian retribution.
The national security Reps never went away, they just don’t fully control their party at the moment and need help from Dems to pass legislation.
These guys still heartily endorse Trump. They’re nowehere near so concerned with the country’s best interests as you’re giving them credit for.
As regards policy making along with the opposition, I often refer to what Thatcher said of Gorbachev: We can do business with him.
You’re making a lot of hoo-ha out of one vote. Let’s see if they can keep it up in the months ahead in the teeth of Trump’s disapproval and the MAGA Mob’s animosity. As Trump’s chances continue to fade in the glare of the publicity surrounding his trials, the mob is only going to get more dangerous to those it views as traitors. I have said before on this blog that a very real future danger is the guy who sees himself succeeding Trump as America’s savior. Trump is increasingly a stuffed effigy.
Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and their ilk are not persuadable by little things like intelligence briefs because they really don’t care about the country.
The people who brought us Vietnam cared about the country? The people who invaded Iraq cared about the country? The people who had us spend 20 years in Afghanistan to accomplish NOTHING cared about the country? The people who gave Biden and the Democrats EVERYTHING they wanted on Urkaine while getting nothing on border control, directly and nakedly breaking promises to the contrary, care about the country?
This gets at the heart of the problem with Trump and his haters. No matter how badly the establishment performs, James Joyner believes the non-establishment cannot question them. No matter how many times the establishment fails, the non-establishment is not allowed to challenge them. To James Joyner, there are just certain people who are supposed to run the country and certain people who aren’t. There are people who are important and people who are not. And the people who are not important should just shut up and do what their betters say, no matter how wrong or stupid or destructive those commands are.
The Speaker of the U.S. House of Representative just completely flip-flopped on a question of war, something that could ultimately cost the lives of untold numbers of Americans, and apparently did it based on SECRET information the American public is not allowed to know. If that’s how James Joyner thinks things should be run, okay. But please don’t ever again call the United States a democracy.
Wonder how many of those who voted for the bill lose in their next primary? I suspect that as alluded to in the article there were some who voted no for that very fear. We dont really have two political parties. We have one plus a cult of personality. You take great risk in defying the cult leader. What you hear in intelligence briefings or what you can discern from paying attention dont really matter since only the opinion of the leader matters and he doesnt have to have good reasons.
Steve
@steve: So, I note that this bill only came up for a vote in the House after we are deep into primary season. Personally, I don’t think that’s a coincidence. It’s too late now to primary someone this time over Ukraine aid (or “disloyalty to Trump” etc).
That seems relevant. It also seems like something that wouldn’t be mentioned by either McConnell or Johnson.
So, I think the best tale of Mike Johnson’s motivation will probably not be told. Intel briefs, I’m sure, had some influence. (Do you see the loophole in the quote, “Intel briefs can do a lot”?) But he’s so hard to pin down. He might have supported it all along, but said things that made it sound like he opposed it, or voted against it when it was obviously going to fail. He avoids making commitments, but that’s a sign of a guy who keeps the actual commitments he makes, which is something that now seems as if it describes him.
@steve:
This will be the ultimate measure of change. They defied Trump and the MAGAs, and if they lose office then kudos to them but their place will be taken by a MAGA, and it shows nothing has changed but the names. If, on the other hand, they hold their seats it will be an indication that the crazies are losing power.
James, you said
and my immediate reaction was “Baloney”, but upon further reflection my dislike of Gingrich is so intense I think it clouds my judgement. So I have to concede that it may be true that he had actual policies that he thought were good for the country rather than just good for Newt Gingrich or his patrons.
Jay- Excellent point. I didnt even think of that. Also, I think Gingrich actually had ideas, maybe bad ones but he had ideas and was more than willing to talk policy. Compare that with the modern GOP. It revolves around a few basics. Do whatever Trump says. Own the libs. Cut taxes.
Steve
@TheRyGuy:
Here’s the problem with Trump supporters (or at least apologists): they refuse to admit that this particular self-own was generated by *check notes* Donald Trump who blew up a compromise deal that would have given the Republicans enough concessions on border control that the Border Officer Union supported it.
And when we ask the reason why: Trump felt it would hurt him politically.
And so they scuttled the deal and instead, months later, got nothing. And yet, the issue here is *checks notes* the moderate Republicans.
I also find it fascinating that so much of the Neo-isolationist rhetoric is based on the prediction that Americans will eventually be deployed in that conflict. I’m curious if anyone can provide other examples in recent history where we had any sustained troop deployments in so-called proxy wars. In particular ones that don’t involve treaty nations (i.e. non-NATO).
Also, I’m really curious why I have seen little to no serious engagement in RW circles with Trump’s silence over this particular deal. Given his longstanding anger at the deep state and his previous opposition to funding Ukraine (either without any investigation into Biden during his administration or, post, funding that isn’t a loan), you would think he would be leading the revolution against it.
Wait, so is this the pivot we’ve heard so much about?
@Assad K: Well, I’d call it “better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick,” but if some people want to call it a pivot, I won’t quibble with them. Progress is going to be painstakingly slow if Congress has to wait until primary season is over to take action given that Representatives run every other year and are, therefore, running 24/7.
@MarkedMan: I would never, ever, ever give Gingrich the benefit of the doubt on anything, his whole career was a scam. I remember reading about this one, it was one of his greatest hits:
Newt Gingrich Spams Doctors: Give Me $5000 And I’ll Give You A ‘Prestigious’ Award
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gingrich-faxes-doctors-in_n_759871
As a con artist Newt may have been an amateur compared to Trump, but he was pretty good
back in the day.
He also did an “entrepeneur of the year” award in 2009.
His group would just send out tons of these “awards”, and see which fish bit.
Further to your point, Matt Bernius, I can think of two significant wars in the last century where our continued attempts at isolation ended up drawing our troops into battle. I get the impression that it does not cross TheRyGuy‘s mind that our simple wish to keep out of harm’s way will ultimately keep us out of harm’s way. It’s the kind of short sighted thinking that will shorten up your games of Chess by a lot.
@steve:
I think they are probably safe. Trump switched his position to supporting the bill when it became clear he wasn’t going to be able to block it, and Lindsey Graham started gaslighting the issue into saying Trump had always been for it immediately.
https://www.newsweek.com/lindsey-graham-crediting-trump-ukraine-aid-passing-raises-eyebrows-loans-1892592
Trumps only true super-power is getting in front of a stampede and convincing everybody he’s leading it. At that, the guy is all but peerless.
@Not the IT Dept.:
Dr. Joyner is expressing hope.
A return to some degree of “politics stops at the water’s edge” would be very welcome. But it requires responsible leadership, eschewing both appeasement and misadventure. It is possible in the long term, if unlikely now.
But please don’t ever again call the United States a democracy.
If your boyfriend Trump becomes Dictator for a day in January 2025 as he has clearly stated that he would do I suspect that he will use that day to declare himself Dictator for Life.
Unless Vice President Harris throws out the rigged Electoral College results and gives Biden another term. You know like Trump and his cronies tried to do January 2021.
@Mister Bluster:
Come to think of it, Lardass and his deplorables just might claim victory again, but that Harris did what Pence wouldn’t. So it’s a double secret stollen election.
What? We’d have to see Harris actually reject the results and stuff? As if evidence ever made a difference to this bunch?
@TheRyGuy:
MAGA cult Putin apppears demanded a border bill in exchange for exchange Ukraine aid. They got one: McConnell deputized a conservative Oklahoma senator to negotiate a bipartisan border bill. The Border Patrol endorsed it. President Biden pledged to sign it. Jeffries and Schumer signaled they’d help ensure passage.
Don Snoreleone, Moscow Marjorie, and MAGA then kill that border bill. Why?
Because rightwingers do not care about the country or the border. MAGA cares about:
1) childish, reflexive opposition to anything Democrats support,
2) manipulating losers with xenophobic scapegoating of poor, powerless migrants,
3) doing whatever their masters Putin and Trump tell them to, like braindead sheep.
Mike Johnson belatedly decided the security of America and its allies could no be delayed no longer. Trump and his acolytes are the reason no border bill was attached. If you were honest and patriotic, that’s who you’d blame. Since Trump cultists are bootlicking anti-American liars, you won’t.
@dazedandconfused:
As a follow up thought, Trump’s switch to supporting this, as “documented” by Lindsey Graham, leaves some of his more strident minions in a strange place. Massie and MTG declared war on Speaker Johnson over this issue, and here they are…suddenly finding themselves as the RHINOs? That stands to “leave a mark”, as they say.
Being left looking utterly silly by their Dear Leader may temper their zeal a wee bit.