Election of new US House Speaker has implications for Ukraine aid
William RobertsWednesday 1 November 2023
In late October, the US House of Representatives finally selected a new Speaker after 23 days of drama that paralysed Congress. Representative Mike Johnson, a Republican backbencher from Louisiana, was elected to the top post in the House on 25 October after three more senior colleagues failed to garner the requisite support.
Legislators Tom Emmer, Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise were each unable to muster enough votes. Jordan and Scalise were opposed by moderates. Emmer, a moderate, was blocked by former President Donald Trump, who sank Emmer’s bid with a post on his Truth Social platform.
Speaker Johnson now faces a series of legislative and political challenges, including finding a compromise with President Joe Biden and Democrats to avoid a government shutdown in November and pass military aid for Ukraine and Israel. ‘I have concerns about his ability to navigate the very real challenges within his own party’, says Matt Kaiser, Senior Vice-Chair of the IBA Criminal Law Committee and a partner at law firm KaiserDillon in Washington, DC. ‘It probably means bad things for Ukraine aid. Not that it won’t happen, but that less is likely.’
Elected with Trump in 2016, Johnson replaces Representative Kevin McCarthy who had been sacked as Speaker by his own party in early October after reaching a budget compromise with Biden and Democrats to prevent a US default on its sovereign debt.
Some Trump allies have been sceptical of US aid to Ukraine. Johnson has indicated he supports President Biden’s request for $61bn in aid to Ukraine, but wants to put ‘conditions’ on it. ‘We want accountability, and we want objectives that are clear from the White House’, he said.
[Mike Johnson’s election] probably means bad things for Ukraine aid. Not that it won’t happen, but that less is likely
Matt Kaiser
Senior Vice-Chair, IBA Criminal Law Committee
Johnson is an evangelical Christian from Shreveport, Louisiana, the third largest city in the southern Gulf Coast state. He favours lower taxes, smaller government and prayer in public schools. He opposes LGBTQI+ rights, abortion, marijuana legalisation, immigration reform and clean energy incentives.
He served as a member of Trump’s legal defence team in the former president’s impeachment trials and supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. His ascendance to the speakership is a victory for Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ movement.
‘For those in the international arena, they’re very worried about where we’re going. We all are’, says James Thurber, distinguished professor of government and Founder of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University in Washington, DC. ‘We have extreme polarisation between the parties, but also within the parties.’
In addition to funding for Ukraine, President Biden has requested $14bn for Israel, $13.6bn to secure the US–Mexico border and $7.4bn for Taiwan and the Asia Pacific. The US Senate is looking to combine the aid requests into a single package.
The big immediate challenge facing Speaker Johnson is the risk of a US government shutdown after 17 November if he cannot forge a stopgap budget compromise with Democrats. Like McCarthy before him, under the rules, Johnson is subject to a potential no-confidence vote at any time and would need the support of 218 of the House’s 221 Republicans to keep the Speaker’s gavel.
Meanwhile, there’s more money available for Ukraine if the international community is willing to seize Russia’s sovereign assets outside that country that have been frozen and are being held mostly in Europe.
In the US, Laurence H Tribe, emeritus professor of law at Harvard Law School, has been advocating for Biden to take action to seize about $5bn in assets of Russia’s central bank that are held in the US. Tribe and law firm Kaplan Hecker & Fink in New York City have produced a 123-page report detailing the legal case for transferring Russian sovereign assets to Ukraine.
Tribe and Kaplan Hecker argue that the US International Emergency Economic Powers Act 1977 gives the US President clear authority by the stroke of a pen to take Russian assets and transfer them to Ukraine. The law was used by President George W Bush in 2003 to confiscate sovereign assets of Iraq. ‘To some extent, the hang up over the Speaker of the House may explain the reluctance to do anything, lest someone make the argument that with all of this money belonging to the Russian state lying around, we don’t need to burden our taxpayers, we don’t need to fund Ukraine’, Tribe said.
The Biden administration is exploring how to create a legal framework that would allow European nations to seize the Russian state’s assets for the reconstruction of Ukraine. ‘We’re looking at what legal authorities we may have, the Europeans may have, to actually use those assets for Ukraine’, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said at an event in Texas in early October.
The cost of rebuilding Ukraine has been estimated at between $400bn to $1tn, depending on how long the war lasts. EU leaders have agreed on a plan to tax the profits from Russian assets held primarily in Belgium. In Canada, new legislation would give the executive branch authority to seize Russian state assets outright, including central bank reserves. Estonia’s parliament is also considering allowing frozen Russian assets to be used for reconstructing Ukraine.
Image credit: Игорь Головнёв/AdobeStock.com