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Aoun “will provide critical leadership as Lebanon and Israel” end hostilities between the Jewish state and Hezbollah, Biden said.

(JNS)

President Joe Biden congratulated Lebanon’s army chief Joseph Aoun, after an overwhelming majority of the country’s parliament voted to elect him as president.

“President Aoun has my confidence,” Biden said on Thursday. “I believe strongly he is the right leader for this time.”

Noting that Aoun’s election “comes just six weeks after the United States secured an end to the hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel,” Biden said the new head of state “will provide critical leadership as Lebanon and Israel fully implement that cessation of hostilities and as hundreds of thousands of people return to their homes and Lebanon recovers and rebuilds.”

The Lebanese people, he continued, have suffered for more than two years from a devastating war and continuing financial crisis, as well as the absence of national leadership.

“Through their elected parliamentarians, the people of Lebanon have exercised their democratic right to choose their own future,” Biden said. “They have chosen a path aligned with peace, security, sovereignty, and reconstruction in partnership with the international community. And the United States will support them as they walk that path.”

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar also congratulated Aoun and expressed his hope “that this choice will contribute towards stability, a better future for Lebanon and its people and to good neighborly relations.”

Image: Commander of the Lebanese Armed Forces Joseph Aoun at a wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, in Arlington, Va., on June 26, 2018. Credit: Elizabeth Fraser/Arlington National Cemetery via Wikimedia Commons.

The House also agreed to a rules package that includes a measure to impose sanctions on the International Criminal Court as it seeks the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Andrew Bernard

(JNS)

The U.S. House of Representatives re-elected Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) as speaker on Friday on a dramatic first ballot after Johnson persuaded Republican holdouts to switch their votes.

Nine Republicans initially declined to vote for Johnson when their names were called in the alphabetical roll-call vote for speaker, leaving Johnson with 210 votes to 215 for Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.)

Six of those Republicans subsequently voted for Johnson when their names were called a second time, but Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) and Keith Self (R-Texas) voted for other candidates, leaving Johnson short of an overall majority.

Johnson later left the floor with Norman and Self, who minutes later returned to the clerk’s desk to change their votes for Johnson, leaving Massie as the lone Republican holdout in the speaker vote.

Norman and Self reportedly had phone calls with President-elect Donald Trump before changing their votes.

Johnson ultimately secured 218 votes, all from Republicans, the minimum required to secure a majority among the 434 members-elect present.

While Republicans will control both chambers of Congress and the presidency after Trump is sworn in on Jan. 20, the difficulty in securing Johnson’s speakership on the first ballot points to the fractious House coalition that Trump and Johnson will have to navigate.

Trump congratulated Johnson. “The people of America have waited four years for common sense, strength and leadership,” Trump wrote. “They’ll get it now, and America will be greater than ever before.”

A letter from the board of the House Freedom Caucus, signed by most of the holdouts, said that they ultimately chose to back Johnson to ensure the timely certification of Trump’s election, but laid out some of their demands for their continued support of the speaker, including spending cuts and border security measures.

“There is zero room for error on the policies the American people demanded when they voted for President Trump,” they wrote. “We demand the House of Representatives deliver—quickly.”

The selection of a House speaker from among the majority party has been a formality for the past century but has become increasingly contentious in recent years on the Republican side of the aisle.

John Boehner resigned the speakership in 2015, amid a looming battle with the party’s right flank, and his successor Paul Ryan declined to run for reelection in 2018 after frequently butting heads with Trump.

In 2023, eight Republicans joined with every Democrat to oust then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy with a motion to vacate the speakership, the first time that procedure had been executed in American history, and Johnson was subsequently elected speaker.

Johnson survived a motion to vacate in May after he received the support of most Democrats and all but 11 Republicans.

After Johnson’s re-election as speaker on Friday, the House also agreed to the rules package for the 119th Congress by a vote of 215 to 209.

The package increases the threshold for a motion to vacate from one member of the majority to nine.

It also includes a provision to ease the passage of a bill instructing the president to impose sanctions on the International Criminal Court over arrest warrants that it has issued for Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The text of the underlying bill, which passed the House 247-155 in June, instructs the president to impose sanctions on any member of the ICC enaged in “any attempt to investigate, arrest, detain or prosecute” U.S. citizens or the citizens of U.S. allies not party to the Rome Statute of the ICC, including Israel.

“The ICC’s actions against Israel are illegitimate and baseless, including the preliminary examination and investigation of Israel and applications for arrest warrants against Israeli officials, which create a damaging precedent that threatens the United States, Israel and all United States partners who have not submitted to the ICC’s jurisdiction,” the bill says.

“The United States must oppose any action by the ICC against the United States, Israel or any other ally of the United States that has not consented to ICC jurisdiction or is not a state party to the Rome Statute of the ICC,” it adds.

Image: House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) addresses an estimated 200,000 at the “March for Israel” rally in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 14, 2023. Source: Screenshot.