At long last, the U.S. House of Representatives has passed a bill funding further military aid to #Ukraine, by a vote of 311 to 112. #USPolitics #Democracy #Geopolitics
Among Democrats, the vote was 210–0;
Republicans: 101–112.
Why Speaker Mike Johnson did this now rather than in February, resulting in a loss of thousands of lives and significant territory for Ukraine, has yet to be adequately explained.
Oh, it’s easy to explain why this happened now and not then. It all comes down to procedures of the House.
The Speaker can’t just pass legislation unilaterally. He’s even limited in how he can propose the consideration of legislation.
It took this long to find a way to gain enough votes among US representatives to move the legislation forward, and it involved compromises and tradoffs that popped up between then and now.
You can see how this worked out, how complicated it was, by looking at the list of votes here:
https://clerk.house.gov/Votes
@fogmount that’s not how the House functions, though, in the real world.
Yes, Johnson could have pushed the bill to the floor, a number of different ways, but each would have had serious direct and indirect drawbacks ranging from opposition from the House Rules Committee through yet another rigmarole over the motion to vacate.
And all without a guarantee that the shoved-through legislation would pass anyway due to the violation of norms.
The opposition to Johnson’s proceeding without significant majority party buy-in would have had substantial negative repercussions to the whole chamber.
It took this long to build the coalition needed to move.
@volkris You say you’re talking about how things “function… in the real world,” but your remarks continue to sound like long-winded, arrogant guesswork based on a theoretical but superficial understanding of House rules and process, rather than on facts as reported by congressional reporters and remarks made by actual members of Congress in real time. #OverAndOut
@fogmount believe it or not, congressional reporters often relay superficial versions of events that are (hopefully) oversimplified for the sake of what they think their readers want.
When a reporter skips the complexities of a rule voted on by the Rules Committee, for example, they’re missing a complicated step in House procedure, but without including that step their readers won’t have a full picture of what just happened.
Here’s something real for you to check out if you’d like. Go through the list of votes on April 20th. I heard no mainstream reporter actually report that process, and yet the reality was just that complicated.
@volkris I have been following this issue closely for many months, and quite frankly, nearly everything in your post is nonsense. To use the simplest example among many options he had at various times, Johnson could have put the bill the Senate passed as an amendment to HR 815 on February 13 up for a floor vote at any time thereafter, and it would have passed just as the belated House package did, with overwhelming Democratic support plus a minority of Republicans. https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/815