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There’s no shortage of divisions on Capitol Hill, but Democratic and Republican leaders are clearly on the same page when it comes to NATO and its expansion. Indeed, as Finland and Sweden move closer to joining the alliance, this a rare issue in which the parties are reading from the same script.
That is, at the leadership level. As The Hill reported, there are still some far-right Republicans with a very different perspective.
More than a dozen House Republicans voted against a resolution on Monday that expressed support for Finland and Sweden joining NATO. The House passed the measure, which had bipartisan sponsorship, in a 394-18 vote, with all the opposition coming from the Republican Party. Two Democrats and 17 Republicans did not vote.
As the roll call showed, there were some familiar names among the 18 GOP lawmakers who opposed the resolution:
- Andy Biggs of Arizona
- Dan Bishop of North Carolina
- Lauren Boebert of Colorado
- Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina
- Ben Cline of Virginia
- Michael Cloud of Texas
- Warren Davidson of Ohio
- Matt Gaetz of Florida
- Bob Good of Virginia
- Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia
- Morgan Griffith of Virginia
- Thomas Massie of Kentucky
- Tom McClintock of California
- Mary Miller of Illinois
- Ralph Norman of South Carolina
- Matt Rosendale of Montana
- Chip Roy of Texas
- Jefferson Van Drew of New Jersey
Note, each of these members realized that the resolution would pass easily. They also knew that their own party’s leadership team supported the measure. But all 18 of them, eager to get their disapproval on the record, voted “no” anyway.
Whether 18 is seen as a large or small number is a matter of perspective. It was four years ago last week, for example, when the House passed a resolution expressing support for NATO by unanimous voice vote, as then-Speaker Paul Ryan described the international coalition as “indispensable.”
Three months ago, however, 63 House Republicans — representing nearly a third of the GOP conference — voted “no” on a similar resolution. With this in mind, 18 seems like a more modest total.
The matter now heads to the Senate, where the debate is tough to predict with confidence.
Circling back to our earlier coverage, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, to his credit, not only supports NATO expansion, he’s also endorsed action on the issue before members break for their August recess. As we discussed in May, the question is how many of his own members will agree, given pockets of Republican hostility toward the alliance.
Donald Trump, of course, was far more antagonistic toward the alliance than any modern American leader, and the Republican did more than just disparage NATO: On several occasions, Trump expressed an interest in abandoning NATO altogether. According to multiple accounts, it was a plan he intended to follow through on in a second term.
The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake added in a recent analysis that Finland and Sweden would need at least two-thirds of the Senate voting to ratify their membership, and “exactly how that debate would go down could be quite interesting — especially in light of the GOP’s slight-but-significant Trump-era drift into more skepticism of NATO.”
Yesterday’s House vote was encouraging for NATO proponents — the 18 “no” votes represented only about 9 percent of the overall Republican conference in the chamber — but that was with the former president ignoring the issue. If Trump were to demand that senators oppose ratification, how many Republicans would ignore his call? Watch this space.
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