The US House of Representatives will vote on Saturday on multi-billion dollar packages for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, which received the strong support of President Joe Biden.
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Elected officials will vote on four texts, the outlines of which were revealed early Wednesday afternoon.
The first provides nearly $61 billion to help Ukraine — mostly military aid.
Separate bills also provide more than $26 billion to support Israel and several billion dollars for Taiwan.
Entangled in partisan disputes, Congress has been struggling for months over the adoption of funds for Kyiv, at war with Russia since February 2022.
Biden op-ed
In a statement released in the afternoon, US President Joe Biden said he was “very supportive” of these envelopes.
“The House of Representatives must adopt these texts this week and the Senate must act immediately,” urged the Democratic leader, who has been pleading for months for the sending of these funds.
Wednesday morning, he reiterated his call in the columns of Wall Street Journal.
“Both Ukraine and Israel are under attack from impudent enemies who seek their annihilation,” he said in a column.
“While both countries are fully capable of defending their own sovereignty, they depend on American aid, including arms, to do so. And we are at a pivotal moment,” he wrote in the daily.
Russian President Vladimir Putin “wants to subdue the Ukrainian people and absorb their nation into a new Russian empire,” he added, also believing that “the Iranian government wants to destroy Israel, and thus wipe off the map forever the only Jewish State in the World.
“America must never accept any of these results,” asserted Joe Biden.
Motion of censure
Ukraine is desperately short of ammunition in its war against Russia and American funds are exhausted.
Israel, for its part, faced a direct and unprecedented attack from Iran on the night of Saturday to Sunday, in a context of high regional tensions.
A package of $60 billion in military and economic assistance for Ukraine was adopted in the Senate in February. But Republicans in the House of Representatives refused to consider the text — due, among other things, to a dispute over the issue of immigration.
If it is adopted by the Republican-majority House, the batch of texts unveiled on Wednesday will then be studied by the Democratic-majority Senate, before possibly arriving on Joe Biden’s desk for promulgation.
Mike Johnson’s announcement was rejected by some of his Republican colleagues, reviving the possibility of a censure motion and a new crisis in the House.
His predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, was dismissed last year after a rebellion by the Trumpist wing of his party.
Mike Johnson plunged the Republican Party “into chaos by serving the Democrats and adopting Biden’s agenda,” elected official Marjorie Taylor Greene criticized on X.
“Now he is going to finance wars abroad,” she added. He “must announce a date for his resignation and allow Republicans to elect a new one to put America first and pass a Republican agenda.”
The “speaker” ruled out any voluntary departure.
“I will not resign,” Mike Johnson told the press, deeming the threat of filing a motion of censure “absurd”.
