The Senate passed a long-awaited foreign aid package for Ukraine and Israel early Tuesday morning, delivering a bipartisan endorsement of the legislation after months of negotiations, dire battlefield warnings and political mudslinging. But the measure faced a buzz saw of opposition in the House, where Republican resistance threatened to kill it.
The 70-to-29 vote reflected a critical mass of support in Congress for the $95 billion emergency aid legislation and for continuing to arm Ukraine in its fight against Russian aggression. The measure would provide an additional $60.1 billion for Kyiv — bringing the total U.S. investment in the war effort to over $170 billion — as well as $14.1 billion for Israel’s war against Hamas and almost $10 billion for humanitarian aid for civilians in conflict zones, including Palestinians in Gaza.
But it also splintered Republicans and foretold a bumpy road ahead in the G.O.P.-led House, where the speaker suggested late Monday that he would not act on it.
Cute, NYT.
The fate is absolutely certain. It’s been pre-ordained to die.
Really just speaks to how Bill scheduling shouldn’t be in the hands of the governing party alone, all it does is allow party leaders to not even let their members have the option to cut against the party line when they’d actually be inclined to do so.
Yeah all the civics lessons and “I’m just a bill” cartoons we say through in school never touched on the fact that if the house majority leader doesn’t want something to pass, they can just never let the bill be voted on. Kind of a pretty big loophole.
There are procedural tricks for the minority to get a bill on the floor, if it has support of more than half of members (meaning some of the majority would need to sign on to advance it).
They are not often successful, because if the leadership is well organized, they can prevent anyone from their majority from signing on. But I’m not sure that this Speaker knows what he is doing. He seemed to be genuinely surprised when the first impeachment vote failed. But in this case, I doubt Democrats can even get 100% of their own people signing on, because of the funding for Israel. So the hard part might be getting their own people to sign, not the handful of Republicans they will need.
It’s called a discharge petition for anyone looking for more details.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discharge_petition
But basically no filibuster in the house. Can force a vote on pretty much anything against the speaker’s wishes if a majority is in favor. Might take up to a month though.