Speaker Mike Johnson said on Sunday after Iran’s overnight attack on Israel that the House would vote in the coming days on aid for Israel, and he suggested that aid for Ukraine could be included in the legislation.
“House Republicans and the Republican Party understand the necessity of standing with Israel,” Mr. Johnson said on Fox News, noting that he had previously advanced two aid bills to help the U.S. ally. “We’re going to try again this week, and the details of that package are being put together. Right now, we’re looking at the options and all these supplemental issues.”
U.S. funding for both Israel and Ukraine has languished in Congress; Mr. Johnson initially refused to take up a $95 billion aid package for Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan passed by the Senate, and the Senate refused to take up a House Republican proposal that conditioned aid to Israel on domestic spending cuts.
In recent weeks, Mr. Johnson has repeatedly vowed to ensure that the House moves to assist Ukraine. He has been searching for a way to structure a foreign aid package that could secure a critical mass of support amid stiff Republican resistance to sending aid to Kyiv and mounting opposition among Democrats to unfettered military aid for Israel.
But the attacks from Iran have ratcheted up the pressure on Mr. Johnson to bring some kind of package to the floor this week, potentially forcing him to make a decision he has been agonizing over for weeks.
He left it unclear on Sunday whether the legislation he said the House would advance this week would also include aid for Ukraine.
Mr. Johnson said he believed that some proposals around Ukraine aid enjoyed broad support among House Republicans. He noted that he met with former President Donald J. Trump on Friday at his estate in Florida and that Mr. Trump had been supportive of conditioning the aid as a loan.
“I think these are ideas that I think can get consensus, and that’s what we’ve been working through,” Mr. Johnson said. “We’ll send our package. We’ll put something together and send it to the Senate and get these obligations completed.”
Before the attacks in Israel over the weekend, Mr. Johnson had privately floated bringing up the $95 billion spending package for Ukraine and Israel passed by the Senate in February — and moving it through the House in tandem with a second bill containing policies endorsed by the conservative wing of his party. That plan envisioned two consecutive votes — one on the Senate-passed bill and another on a package of sweeteners geared toward appeasing Republicans who otherwise would be infuriated by Mr. Johnson’s decision to push through a bipartisan aid package for Ukraine.
Representative Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas and the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said on Sunday that the two conflicts were tied together, and that he hoped they would be addressed together. “What happened in Israel last night happens in Ukraine every night,” he said on CBS’s “Face The Nation.”
Mr. McCaul said that he had previously secured a “commitment” from Mr. Johnson that a broad national security bill would be brought to the House floor for a vote, but that the timing was unclear.
“My preference,” he said, “is this week.”
Minho Kim contributed reporting.
