“I am so proud of the speaker, Mike Johnson. He went through a transformation,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican, said on ABC News’ “This Week.” “At the end of the day, a profile in courage is putting the nation above yourself — and that’s what he did. He said, ‘At the end of the day, I’m going to be on the right side of history, irrespective of my job,’ and I think that was what I admired so much.”
Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, agreed.
“I disagree with Speaker Johnson on many issues, and I’ve been very critical of him,” Khanna told “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl in a separate interview. “But he did the right thing here and he deserves to keep his job ’til the end of his term.”
Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of Johnson’s loudest critics within their party, has proposed but not yet acted on a motion to vacate the speakership over his support for the foreign aid bills — in particular $60.8 billion in aid to help Ukraine.
More Republicans, including House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, voted against the Ukraine aid bill than for it over the weekend.
Greene would need only one other Republican to join her in ousting Johnson, as happened last year to Kevin McCarthy, unless enough Democrats also side with him. Khanna suggested on Sunday that they will — even absent additional concessions.
“Would you and fellow Democrats that will protect him at this moment — ask for anything in return?” Karl pressed.
“I’ll leave the negotiations to Speaker (sic) [Hakeem] Jeffries, but I don’t think everything in politics needs to be transactional,” Khanna said. “I think here you have Speaker Johnson, who not only put this up for a vote but he also separated the bills, which I thought was courageous. He let people vote their conscience on Taiwan, on the offensive aid to Israel, on Ukraine. And I give him credit for that.”
The House votes on Saturday — advancing the four foreign aid bills for Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and other Indo-Pacific allies — marked a dramatic reversal for Republican leaders like Johnson, who for months have said additional funds to Ukraine must be tied to a tightening of U.S. border and immigration laws.
But efforts to broker compromise on that point failed to win over enough conservatives. A high-profile agreement in the Senate to overhaul border policy was quickly rejected by Johnson and others as insufficient after opposition from former President Donald Trump.
And then, earlier this month, Johnson announced his support for individual votes on additional aid, including to Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s invasion as well as to Israel, currently at war with Hamas.
“To put it bluntly, I would rather send bullets to Ukraine than American boys,” Johnson said last week, invoking his own son, who is going to the Naval Academy.
On “This Week,” McCaul was pressed by Karl over Johnson’s changing views — and the lengthy delay involved in the legislative process, to ultimately end up with Congress backing a similar amount of aid as the White House first proposed last year.
McCaul said that Johnson initially supported the position of hard-line Republicans but recognized that with the government divided, another path had to be chosen.
“He tried to do what the, you know, say the Freedom Caucus wanted him to do. It wasn’t going to work in the Senate or the White House,” McCaul said. “At the end of the day, we were running out of time. Ukraine’s getting ready to fall.”
Johnson’s classified briefings and hearing from Republican leaders on the issue like House Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner had influenced his thinking, McCaul said.
McCaul also suggested that, essentially, Johnson, once a little-known legislator, had to learn on the job after being thrust into the speakership in the fall amid a chaotic power struggle within the GOP’s House conference.
“He became the man that went from a district in Louisiana to the speaker of the United States to also someone who had to look at the entire world and had to carry the burden of that and make the right decision,” McCaul said.
