Mike Johnson Grows Spine And Passes Ukraine Aid, And Marjorie Taylor Greene Is MAD
Congrats on doing the bare minimum asked of you.
Boyishly flop-haired Speaker of the House Mike Johnson finally pushed an aid package for Ukraine through the lower chamber of Congress on Saturday, defying much of his caucus and giving Marjorie Taylor Greene a sad.
As with must-pass appropriations bills to keep the government open and functioning that he pushed through earlier in his brief tenure, Johnson passed the Ukraine bill with mostly Democratic votes. Will this teach him, and by extension much of his caucus, a lesson about the need to negotiate and yes, engage in that dirty word “compromise,” in a two-party system with multiple veto points that can favor ideological minorities? Ha ha ha, probably not.
What finally moved Johnson to act? Was it the shame of realizing that thousands of Ukrainians have died horrifying bloody deaths over the last six months while he wrung his hands like a society matron who can’t pick a china pattern for a charity dinner? Don’t be silly. He prayed on it and decided the invisible sky man wanted him to help Ukraine.
On Tuesday, Johnson sat in his office as members streamed in to voice their complaints and level their demands. By nighttime, he was wrestling how to proceed. Feeling the weight of his future and knowing history was watching him, Johnson, a devout Christian, turned to prayer.
We guess we would probably turn to prayer as well if we had to spend a day worried the likes of Matt Gaetz might threaten to date our teenage daughter if we didn’t do what he wanted. Or bourbon. Whichever one helps us pass out so we don’t have to deal with Matt Gaetz, that’s the one we’re going with.
“My philosophy is do the right thing and let the chips fall where they may. If I operated out of fear over motion to vacate, I would never be able to do my job. Look, history judges us for what we do. This is a critical time right now,” Johnson said Wednesday.
“I can make a selfish decision and do something that is different, but I’m doing here what I believe to be the right thing. I think providing aid to Ukraine right now is critically important,” the speaker added.
Providing aid to Ukraine was also critically important in, like, November, but Mike Johnson was still busy figuring out how to get to the bathroom from his new office then, so sorry, Ukraine.
Whether the invisible sky man who wanted Johnson to help Ukraine for the last six months has been driving Himself nuts up in His invisible sky castle screaming “Mike! This is the Lord your God! Get your thumb out of your ass and get some weaponry to Ukraine! My only son did not command you to care for the downtrodden just to suck up to Me so I’d buy him a car! He really meant it!” is a question that, alas, we cannot answer.
All that said, CNN really needs to tone down the headlines. Mike Johnson did the bare minimum of governance required by his job, we don’t need to compare this to Churchill steering Britain through the Blitz:
No, CNN, you do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to him.
The nutter GOP rump caucus that at the moment seems to consist of Greene, Thomas Massie, and several congressional reporters with a punishment fetish and a desire to repeat the Kevin McCarthy debacle of last fall, will now decide whether it will respond:
“Mike Johnson’s speakership is over. He needs to do the right thing to resign and allow us to move forward in a controlled process. If he doesn’t do so, he will be vacated,” Greene said on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures.”
We have not seen it explicitly stated anywhere, but we’re guessing Johnson made a deal with Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wherein Johnson got the Ukraine bill on the floor and helped it pass with mostly Democratic votes in a policy victory for Joe Biden, and in return the Democrats will vote to keep him in the Speaker’s chair if his caucus brings up a motion to vacate.
If this is the case, Johnson showed way, way, way better political skill than his predecessor McCarthy, who famously spent months trashing the Democrats on everything and then was shocked, shocked when they reciprocated by voting to boot him out of the job the minute they had the opportunity.
And all props to Volodymyr Zelensky, who had to swallow what was probably a metric fuckton of bile to publicly thank and praise Johnson while resisting the urge to ask what took him so goddamn long:
“I am grateful to the United States House of Representatives, both parties, and personally Speaker Mike Johnson for the decision that keeps history on the right track,” he wrote on his Telegram channel. “Democracy and freedom will always have global significance and will never fail as long as America helps to protect it.”
Congrats on showing a bare minimum of decency and commitment to democracy, Mike Johnson. Now go see if there is anything else that a speaker of the House can do that might be useful, even if it means needing Democrats to help.
As the aid bill to Wonkette remains ridiculously low on Mike Johnson’s list of priorities, we rely as ever on our awesome readers to keep us going.
Unless you're cheering for Russia to conquer Ukraine, there's really no coherent reason to oppose sending Ukrainians military aid. Sure, you might not like the government spending money, but this is a drop in the overall defense bucket, so unless you're calling for draconian cuts (and no aid for Israel or other allies, of course) then you just sound ridiculous saying it's about the money. (It's also, like most foreign aid, pumped back into our domestic economy--not the most efficient way to boost American jobs, but not a total loss either).
This also risks not a single U.S. soldier, and gives us an opportunity to bleed down our most aggressive geopolitical rival and protect NATO from Russian aggression. We get to stress test our weaponry in real combat, without risking any losses to ourselves. And the upside of Ukraine surviving is a weakened Putin, a stronger European alliance, and survival of a large democratic state against unjustified aggression (plus, China is watching, and analogizing this to Taiwan).
This is a foreign policy no brainer, which probably explains why people with no brains are trying to block it.
Greene is a Sophomore Representative from nowhere Georgia. Any Republican Speaker from Boehner on back in history would move her office to the last stall in the Ladies room and strip her of staff. Twitter and the media have given her way more power than she would have had otherwise.