When Chuck Schumer and Mike Johnson talked one-on-one for the first time recently, the Senate majority leader urged the new speaker to take a bipartisan approach ahead of a chaotic fall spending fight.
It’s safe to say that Johnson isn’t listening.
The Louisiana Republican on Thursday used his first major legislative push — a $14 billion bill to shore up Israel’s defense against Hamas — to flex his conservative credentials rather than show goodwill toward his Democratic counterpart on a mutual priority.
By muscling through the Israel bill that slashed a key Democratic priority, Johnson sent a clear message to the Senate leader he’ll have to work with for at least another year: He’s fine thumbing his nose at Schumer to help keep the House GOP as united as possible. It’s an approach that may prove difficult for Johnson to maintain.
“His first major legislative effort was not bipartisan at all. And I think he’s going to learn the hard way that that doesn’t work,” Schumer said in an interview Thursday. “The president already said he’d veto it. I said I wouldn’t put it on the floor and McConnell didn’t go for it.”
The New Yorker cited Johnson’s past words from his springtime vote to raise the debt ceiling, in which the future speaker stated that he voted yes in part because Republicans’ control in Washington is limited: “I hope he remembers that sentence as he moves forward. I want to work with him. I want to try.”
Most Democratic and Republican senators are still getting up to speed on the little-known Johnson. But House Republicans, on the influential right flank and beyond, are praising their new leader for playing hardball on Israel aid rather than trying to jam the Senate with a more bipartisan Israel bill without the rest of the Senate’s demands, like Ukraine, which Schumer might have found harder to reject.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/03/schumer-johnson-israel-ukraine-speaker-00125098