Clip: Johnson risks speakership to get Ukraine aid bill approved

Jeffrey Goldberg: Good evening and welcome to WASHINGTON WEEK. It's been a busy week, not only in Washington, but in New York, where the 45th president of the United States is currently on trial for alleged shenanigans related to payoffs to an adult film actress, which is a completely normal thing to say.

Mike Johnson, fresh off his legislative victory over Marjorie Taylor Greene and the isolationist wing of his party, headed to Columbia University in New York, to show his support for Jewish students, and also to remind Republicans just how much they dislike the Ivy League.

We have a lot to talk about, and here with me to discuss the week are Peter Baker, who is the chief White House correspondent at the New York Times, Laura Barron-Lopez is the White House correspondent for PBS NewsHour, David Drucker is a senior writer with The Dispatch, and Mara Liasson is a National Political Correspondent for NPR. Welcome all.

Mara, I want to start with you. The big funding bill for Ukraine and Taiwan and Israel and the whole TikTok issue, which we can get into now law, very interesting, not what people were necessarily expecting. So, the big question is, can the center hold?

Mara Liasson, National Political Correspondent, NPR: It did, which is kind of amazing for this. And I think what this showed is that the laws of political gravity and political math have not been completely overturned. If you have a two seat majority in an unruly conference and you want to pass something like Ukraine aid or keep the government open or stop it from going into default, you have to work across the aisle and depend on Democratic votes. And that is considered a cardinal sin among the MAGA wing of the Republicans in the House. But that's what happened this week.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. But the MAGA wing did not rise up and throw out, at least, as of --

Mara Liasson: Not yet. And they -- right now, it looks like they don't have the votes to do that.

But I want to say one other thing that was amazing about this is that Speaker Johnson, he said that one of the reasons he was going to do this is because he believed the intelligence briefings that he got, which is astounding. Because one of the tenets of the modern Trumpy GOP is that you don't believe anything the intelligence community says or the FBI or any law enforcement because Trump thinks all those agencies are the deep state out to get him.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right, especially when your CIA director is appointed by a Democrat.

Mara Liasson: Yes, by a Democrat.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Laura?

Laura Barron-Lopez, White House Correspondent, PBS NewsHour: And that was key. I was texting with a House Republican today who told me that that briefing with CIA Director Bill Burns that Speaker Johnson had was really crucial for him to change his mind and decide that he was going to risk his potential speakership, put this bill on the floor, even though all of the MAGA wing didn't want it, that as well as his conversations with NATO leaders, this House Republican told me were key for speaker Johnson, and then these national security house Republicans who really said to him that he needed to be on the right side of history and made that appeal to him. And that this was not just -- you know, this was also a moral decision that he needed to make, and so then he ultimately shifted.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. So, David, what this means is either Bill Burns is the greatest briefer in history, or that the Reagan wing of the Republican Party is not yet dead, or possibly both. But is this a return to the Reagan-style, muscular, internationalist, anti-Russian, anti-authoritarian wing of the party?

David Drucker, Senior Writer, The Dispatch: You know, as a Cold War kid, that would certainly be the more familiar thing to see. I think that we need to look at it like this. As I traveled the country over the past year covering the Republican primary, what I discovered is that there is still a healthy Republican faction of the Republican Party.  But it is for now, at least as long as Trump is in control of the party, the minority faction, right? But it's there.

And so I think what we saw develop in the House of Representatives in the U.S. Senate in recent days is this faction of the party that still believes in Reagan era, muscular foreign policy assert itself. And so not only were they able to do that, they also were able to team up with a Democratic Party that 40 years ago would never have been with Republicans on that issue.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

David Drucker: The idea that, that, that Joe Biden as president would be the one pushing for this, if we were to go back in time, is almost astounding. And so there was a good confluence of issues and events and agreement that we don't necessarily see on other issues.

I will say too, to Laura's point, you talk to House Republicans who had to go through losing a speaker when most of them didn't want that to happen.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Kevin McCarthy.

David Drucker: Yes. And there's a deep, Amount of frustration at the idea that they were being spun around by a minority, and I think particularly after the mullahs in Iran decided to attack Israel directly, they looked at the national security situation globally and said, we've had enough. We've had enough of being twisted by this minority of our conference, and we've had enough standing down and not doing what the United States is supposed to do. And it all came together to produce this grand compromise that happened in the middle of an otherwise horribly dysfunctional Congress.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. I want to, I want to come back to Speaker Johnson and what this means for his career and staying power in a minute. But I want to stay on the, the subject of the Republican Party writ large.

Peter, do you think that is this more of a blip and that the MAGA wing, the isolationist style wing of the party is going to assert itself?

Peter Baker, Chief White House Correspondent, The New York Times: Well, I think we should be careful with overinterpreting one, one moment, of course.

Jeffrey Goldberg: That's what we do on this show. We over interpret moments.

Peter Baker: Until next week, and we --

Jeffrey Goldberg: Until next week when we reinterpret, yes.

Peter Baker: But it is worth remembering that a majority of the Republicans, or more Republicans in the House voted against the Ukraine aid than voted for it, right? I mean, so yes, it was a strong bipartisan vote majority, 300-some votes, you know, the votes better than I do, very impressive in that sense.

But of the Republicans, most Republicans, more Republicans voted against than the vote for. So, we can't write them off obviously. And that tells you something about the evolution of the party.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, what David's point is so fascinating is the Democrats are the stalwart, cold warriors to borrow your term. Yes, Mara.

MARA LIASSON: But to say something else Donald Trump kind of stood down Yes, he was a real anti Ukraine guy. He got impeached the first time for pressuring Zelenskyy to open up an investigation of Joe Biden. He's still an anti Ukraine guy. He's been very sympathetic and kind of showed a lot of affection for Vladimir Putin. But he didn't insist that Republicans vote against this --

Jeffrey Goldberg: Why?

Mara Liasson: -- in the end. There's a lot of explanations. One is I don't know if he wanted to have a big mess in Europe on his hands if he became president.

Peter Baker: I think the other thing is, to, to David's point too, about the Iran-Israel fight over the previous weekend is that the Republicans realize that their case against Biden rests in part on portraying him as weak, right? He is a weak leader. And it's awfully hard to make that case if they're the ones who are holding up aid to Israel and Ukraine. And so they had to get that off the plate in order to make that case.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Laura, what does this mean for the speaker and his staying power? What have you learned about Speaker Johnson in the last couple of weeks?

Laura Barron-Lopez: Well, he's safe momentarily. I mean, I think next week we are going to see a potential effort by the MAGA wing of the party to potentially raise a motion to vacate.

Now, the Democrats I've spoken to say that --

Jeffrey Goldberg: Motion to vacate means a vote to --

Laura Barron-Lopez: Motion to vacate means a vote to oust him.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Laura Barron-Lopez: And now, of course, it doesn't look like they have the support to actually oust him the way they did for Kevin McCarthy, because this time around, Democrats have told me that a lot of them are willing to put up the votes to protect Speaker Mike Johnson. They feel as though he operated in good faith on Ukraine with this vote.

They aren't going to necessarily do that for free though. They want to see some more compromises out of him and some more ability to have power over what actually comes to the floor and the types of bills that comes to the floor. And it remains to be seen if he's going to actually engage with them.

Mara Liasson: What is an example of something they would want?

Laura Barron-Lopez: Well, power sharing on the Rules Committee. Now this is getting a little weedy, but it has control over what ultimately gets to the floor. And so they want to have more ability and power to say, we want votes on more bills that we think would get big bipartisan votes that wouldn't necessarily reach the floor otherwise.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

David Drucker: You know, Jeff, George Shultz used to say that trust is the coin of the realm when you're talking about how you do things in Washington. I think what the speaker did was prove to Democrats he was trustworthy. And in an initial motion to vacate attempt, I think Democrats will do what they said they would do what they said they are going to do, which is to protect him from that.

I think if this keeps coming up over and over, that's when Democrats start to say, okay, what else is in it for us? By the same token, however, House Republicans broadly do not have an appetite for this. And if Speaker Johnson were actually vacated, they're not going to get Speaker Jordan or Speaker fill-in-the-blank. You're going to end up with a unity speaker of some sort or a centrist Republican, because nobody wants to go through this and reward the malcontents.

And I think the people that are thinking through the motion to vacate that want to bring it, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massie, and some others, are hearing this. And so I'm curious to see if they actually act.

Jeffrey Goldberg: You know, it's so interesting, one of the underrated aspects of Johnson's performance is that he is generally liked. And and Kevin McCarthy, not so liked.

Peter Baker: If you listen to House Democrats, they say were very respectful things about Johnson that they didn't say about McCarthy, even though Johnson is far more to the right and far further away from Democrats ideologically than McCarthy was, right? But they believe that he dealt with them in a straight and up front way and McCarthy didn't.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Peter, I'm going to stay with you for a minute and the actual subject of importance Ukraine and its new found ability, or whether it has a newfound ability, to actually win and reverse the tide. Russia hasn't punched through the lines in a significant way, but everybody in Washington, the analysts in Europe believe that the Ukrainians are on their back foot. Does this change the picture? In a dramatic and ongoing way for Ukraine's chances?

Peter Baker: It changes the picture. It's not quite clear yet. Obviously, they lost a lot of momentum because it took so long to get this money. They've been going for months without enough artillery rounds, for instance, to simply have a proper battle, in effect.

But the most important thing that came along with this $60 billion is also the decision by the Biden administration to give them the long range ATACMS. These are missiles that can fire up to 190 miles away, which the Ukrainians have wanted for a long time. Biden was reluctant to give it to them, gave it to them. And within hours, the Ukrainians put them to good use.

Now, the question is, can those be used to take out some of these radar and the other facilities that the Russians have been using to launch missiles at Ukrainian targets. So, they can take out the Russian ability to whack the infrastructure and civilian targets in Ukraine, they might be able to make a difference. But the expectation is, these next few months are about holding the line, and then to see if in the fall, the delivery of weapons has reached a point where they can actually make a meaningful move forward.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Are we going to be back in this crisis again, when this current tranche of money, current tranche of weapons is run through?

Peter Baker: This should run through this presidency. The real question here is not money at this point. The real question is the November election, okay? Who wins an election? If it's Trump, then they know it's over because they're not going to get any more money. They're certainly not going to get any support. He's already told the world, he's willing to give Russia all the territory he's taken. How do you even negotiate a peace settlement at that point when you've given everything away at the front end? And the Ukrainians know that and the Europeans know that.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.