House Rules Committee removes Ukraine aid from defense funding bill

Following staunch conservative opposition, the House Rules Committee advanced a new rule on the Department of Defense appropriations bill that strips out Ukraine aid, instead including it in a bill that will be voted on separately.

The annual Pentagon funding bill was on a path to failure due to a number of House Republicans being against a provision that would have sent $300 million to Ukraine to train soldiers. In light of this, House leadership decided to strip the aid out of the bill and put it in its own measure that will be voted on separately.

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Last week, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said he intended to remove the Ukraine aid from the defense bill but reversed course on Saturday once it became too “difficult” to do.

An amendment was on the floor Wednesday that would have removed the Ukraine aid from the bill, but it failed. After the vote, enough House Republicans to doom the bill, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), said they would vote against the bill on final passage because of the aid.

Last week, the rule on the defense appropriation bill failed twice, with some members, such as Greene, citing the Ukraine aid as their reason for voting against the bill.

On Tuesday, Greene was the only Republican to vote against a rule for four appropriations bills — including the defense appropriations bill — for the same reason, though the rule advanced.

But a number of Republicans still said that if Ukraine aid was still in the bill, they would vote against it, but if it was removed, they would consider voting for the bill.

Greene, who had been putting pressure on leadership to remove the aid, was so against it that even though the bill included an amendment of hers that would’ve slashed the salary of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to $1 using the Holman rule, she would’ve still voted against it.

Leadership then came up with this plan as a way to pass the defense appropriations bill while also voting on — and likely passing — the money to train Ukrainian soldiers.

“It’s not going away, and we still have more people that support it than don’t,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), the chairman of the Rules Committee, said. “But this is an effort to bring those that aren’t on board with that particular thing but are overall fine with the bill, to give them a face-saving by voting for the bill and still being able to vote on Ukraine.”

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This move by leadership could win over a number of the holdouts on the bill, such as Greene and Rep. Eli Crane (R-AZ), who said he would’ve voted against the bill if it included Ukraine aid but would “really seriously consider” voting for the bill if the Ukraine aid was stripped out.

“They voted twice, and in a pretty overwhelming margin, to keep the Ukraine money in there. So this basically is an attempt to kind of overturn the will of the House, I guess to satisfy Marjorie Taylor Greene, who I guess is the speaker of the House now,” Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA), the ranking member on the Rules Committee, said.