THE HILL
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is under pressure from conservatives and former President Trump to reject an emerging bipartisan border and Ukraine aid package even as he gets the squeeze from the Senate GOP and White House.
Republican senators in support of the deal argue that the leverage of Ukraine aid has given them a unique opportunity to secure key border reforms from a Democratic administration, but the former president, who Johnson says he has consulted, is urging him to reject any legislation that isn’t “perfect.”
The situation leaves little space to operate for the Speaker, who retains a historically slim House majority and is already dealing with rumblings about a move to oust him.
The Speaker emerged from a White House meeting with President Biden and congressional leaders Wednesday — which Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said appeared designed to “strong-arm” him into accepting the Senate deal — remaining highly critical of its reported contents and renewing his calls for Biden to take executive actions at the border.
“If the bill looks like some of the things that have been rumored, of course it’s dead in the House, because it wouldn’t solve the problem,” Johnson said Wednesday on CNN.
Yet Johnson did not completely shut the door on the deal, saying that he needs to wait to see the text of any bill and could not answer questions about a hypothetical.
As he faces pressure on multiple fronts, Johnson insisted on Fox News: “No one is strong-arming me.”
Many House Republicans are more than willing to rule out a border measure that does not go as far as their Secure the Border Act — a sweeping migration policy bill that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has said would be dead on arrival in the upper chamber.
The Senate deal is expected to include changes to asylum policy, but negotiators have said that the issue of humanitarian parole is a major sticking point in the talks.
And in a presidential election year, some Republicans say a deal could neutralize a potent political issue for their party.
“The worst thing we could do is to give the appearance that we’ve done something on border security, to give the American people false hope and a false impression that we’ve done something that will make a difference,” Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), chair of the hard-line conservative House Freedom Caucus, said of the Senate border deal.
Democrats and the Biden administration, Good later added, “want to look like they care about the border then run out the clock and hope that he wins reelection so they never have to implement what they’re not going to implement anyway.”
The most important of the border deal critics is Trump, who posted late Wednesday on his Truth Social website that he expects Johnson to “only make a deal that is PERFECT ON THE BORDER.”
