Report: Speaker Mike Johnson Floats Ukraine Lend-and-Lease Legislation to Republican Senators

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) reportedly said the House of Representatives would cobble together a Ukraine aid bill while speaking with Republican senators on Wednesday during a retreat on Capitol Hill.

The Hill’s Alexander Bolton reported on the conversations that occurred at the Library of Congress during the annual Republican Senate retreat and emphasized the speaker “cautioned that what comes out of the House will look substantially different than the $95 billion foreign aid package the Senate passed last month.”

Per Bolton, Johnson suggested a lend-and-lease program during the meeting but did not mention whether border security measures would be attached to the framework of a bill:

Johnson told senators that the House will send a Ukraine aid package to the Senate but floated the idea of making it a loan or lend-lease program so U.S. taxpayers would not be shelling out tens of billions of dollars without any expectation of getting a return, according to senators who participated in the discussion.

The Speaker also talked about including something similar to the REPO for Ukrainians Act, sponsored by Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), which would authorize the confiscation of Russian sovereign assets and deposit the proceeds of liquidated property into a Ukraine support fund, senators said.

On February 13, the Senate passed its foreign aid package with money promised for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan by a 70-29 vote. Most GOP Senators voted against the bill, which the establishment wing of the conference supported.

The next day, Johnson said the House, which has an ever-thinning GOP majority, “will not be jammed or forced into passing a foreign aid bill,” as the Associated Press noted at the time.

But pressure continues to mount, and Johnson’s talks Wednesday came as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) prodded him to bring the bill to the floor for a vote at a press conference Tuesday.

McConnell indicated he was against negotiations with the House over the Senate’s bill as it currently sits, as Reuters noted:

“Anything that’s changed and sent back here, as you all know, even the simplest thing can take a week in the Senate. We don’t have time for all of this. We’ve got a bill that got 70 votes in the Senate. Give members of the House of Representatives an opportunity to vote on it. That’s the solution,” McConnell told reporters.

House Democrats have circulated a discharge petition that would force a vote on the Senate bill if it gains 218 signatures “or a majority of the seats in the House,” as the Wall Street Journal noted.