House Approves $95 Billion Aid Bill for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan The New York Times

Table Of Content

• Speaker of the House: Rep. Mike Johnson
• House delivers Mayorkas impeachment articles to the Senate to begin a trial
• Hunter Biden’s years of personal grief and public missteps are focus of House impeachment probe
• Unlikely alliance clears way for House vote on Israel and Ukraine aid
• Your Government in Action
• Congress passes first package of spending bills just hours before shutdown deadline for key agencies
• Facing a Republican revolt, House Speaker Johnson’s plan for US aid to Ukraine, allies uncertain

If the federal government shuts down Saturday, numerous publicly funded agencies will stop work and their employees won’t be paid, but Social Security checks will still go out. Democrats support aid for Israel but oppose the House's bill because it cuts funding to ramp up IRS enforcement. As a result, it would add billions to the deficit, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Senate Republicans are trying to use the fact that there is no pending business before the Senate — because they’re waiting for the House to pass this CR so they can start considering it — to try to force consideration of the House-passed Israel aid bill.

Speaker of the House: Rep. Mike Johnson

Among the Democrats who voted against the bill was Representative Ilhan Omar, who has been an outspoken critic of the US’s role in the war on Gaza. Several Western donors have since resumed funding to UNRWA, which is a lifeline for nearly two million people in Gaza. However, despite allocating funds for humanitarian assistance, the bill stipulates that funding for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) is prohibited.

House delivers Mayorkas impeachment articles to the Senate to begin a trial

Speaker Kevin McCarthy told CNN earlier Wednesday that he is confident the debt limit deal will pass with a majority of House Republicans’ support, a critical threshold that GOP leaders have been feverishly working to secure over the last several days. Rep. Ken Buck told CNN after the debt limit deal passed the House that conservatives will be having discussions about ousting Speaker Kevin McCarthy “in the next week or two,” although he didn’t commit to following through with that threat. The package largely mirrors the foreign aid proposal passed by the Senate in February, although it designates $10bn of the Ukraine funding as a repayable loan to appease some Republican members. The Senate is set to begin considering the House-passed bill on Tuesday, with some preliminary votes that afternoon. Final passage was expected sometime next week, which would clear the way for Biden to sign it into law.

Hunter Biden’s years of personal grief and public missteps are focus of House impeachment probe

US House passes $95bn in aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. What next? - Al Jazeera English

US House passes $95bn in aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. What next?.

Posted: Sun, 21 Apr 2024 11:19:09 GMT [source]

Former Colorado paramedic Jeremy Cooper was sentenced to four years probation, 14 months work release and 100 hours of community service on Friday afternoon. These were the updates on the race to become US House speaker for Wednesday, October 4. As speaker pro tempore, the Republican can only recess the House, adjourn the chamber and recognize speaker nominations.

Unlikely alliance clears way for House vote on Israel and Ukraine aid

Jordan said the expected return of Florida Rep. Gus Bilirakis, a Jordan supporter who missed the first vote to be at his mother-in-law’s funeral, should help him and insisted they are chipping away at the holdouts. He said if he voted no on the agreement because of what it lacked, he "would never vote yes." His comments come after conservatives in his conference have claimed the bill does not go far enough to cut spending. The House has passed the debt limit deal to suspend the nation’s debt ceiling through January 1, 2025. President Joe Biden praised the House for passing the bipartisan debt limit deal Wednesday night, and urged the Senate to “pass it as quickly as possible” so he can sign it into law.

Missouri lawmaker wants congressional members to live in their districts - Jefferson City News Tribune

Missouri lawmaker wants congressional members to live in their districts.

Posted: Thu, 25 Apr 2024 09:00:44 GMT [source]

Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., who voted to oust Kevin McCarthy, had an odd run-in with the former speaker in the halls this morning. Rep. Derrick Van Orden, R-Wis., said he'll support the CR today and wondered aloud about criticism of the bill focused on the fact that Democrats plan to support it. The tensions on Capitol Hill are hitting their peak after a long period in session. The House has been working for 10 weeks straight, an unusually long time without a break, and several of them were spent on an ugly fight over the speaker's gavel. Then, Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., tried to start a physical fight with a committee witness, the president of the Teamsters union, Sean O’Brien. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., had to break it up, yelling at both men and banging his gavel.

This follows Israeli unsubstantiated accusations that the agency’s staff were involved in Hamas’s October 7 attacks. The bill, which was stalled for a long time following deep splits in Republican camps, now heads to the Senate for a vote. The longest fight for the gavel started in late 1855 and dragged on for two months, with 133 ballots, during debates over slavery in the run-up to the Civil War.

Mitch McConnell says providing aid for Ukraine is one of the most important legislative victories of his career. The Senate minority leader sat down with CBS News chief foreign affairs correspondent and "Face the Nation" moderator Margaret Brennan to go over his call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. During a news conference Tuesday, Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy said he did not make a deal with the White House on supplemental aid for Ukraine. McHenry, a strong ally of McCarthy’s, played a key role in successfully negotiating the California Republican’s speakership in January by chipping away at some of the same hardline conservatives that opposed McCarthy’s leadership on Tuesday. Chuck Schumer, leader of the Democratic majority in the Senate, confirmed the vote would begin on Tuesday. The legislation now proceeds to the slight-majority Democrat Senate, which passed a similar measure more than two months ago.

Larger weapons systems will take much longer to ship; some still need to be ordered, let alone manufactured. The hope is that it will be enough to fend off a larger-scale Russian offensive that Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s military-intelligence service, has said he expects in June. "When I make a statement that I’m praying about it, I am praying about it, and when I get a call from the speaker and he belittles that, to me, that shows another reason why we need a change in leadership,” Burchett told reporters on the way to the House floor Tuesday. The REPO Act, which would authorize Biden to confiscate the frozen Russian assets in U.S. banks and transfer them to a special fund for Ukraine, is part of the foreign aid package that was stalled for months in the House.

The legislation includes $60 billion for Kyiv; $26 billion for Israel and humanitarian aid for civilians in conflict zones, including Gaza; and $8 billion for the Indo-Pacific region. It would direct the president to seek repayment from the Ukrainian government of $10 billion in economic assistance, a concept supported by former President Donald J. Trump, who had pushed for any aid to Kyiv to be in the form of a loan. Johnson’s reliance on Democratic votes to pass key pieces of legislation, including a major government funding bill that cleared the House last month, has outraged some hard-right Republicans.

More than $6 billion of the $300 billion in frozen Russian assets are sitting in U.S. banks. The contours of an agreement with holdouts from the conservative Freedom Caucus began to take shape, including several of the key rules changes they have been seeking for months. Those changes would shrink the power of the speaker’s office and give rank-and-file lawmakers more influence in drafting legislation. “The discussion about the motion to vacate is going to happen in the next week or two,” Buck, who opposed the debt limit deal, told reporters Wednesday.

As the spectacle of voting dragged on, McCarthy’s backers implored the holdouts to fall in line. “Kevin McCarthy is not going to be a speaker,” declared Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., one of the holdouts. Without a speaker, the House cannot fully form — swearing in its members, naming its committee chairmen, engaging in floor proceedings and launching investigations of the Biden administration. Tensions flared among the new House majority, and all other business came to a halt.