A political group with ties to former Speaker Kevin McCarthy is going on air against some of the Republicans who ousted him from leadership.

The American Prosperity Alliance, a nonprofit which does not have to disclose its donors, is running an immigration-focused TV ad in several districts, including those held by Reps. Bob Good (R-Va.), Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) and Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), where members deposed McCarthy last year.

Brian O. Walsh, a longtime McCarthy ally, is a senior adviser to the group. Walsh is spearheading an effort funded by McCarthy allies to defeat the eight House Republicans who joined with Democrats to boot him from the speakership. Some of those members have already announced they plan to retire. Good, Crane and Mace are among the top targets seeking reelection.

One version of the 30-second spot from the American Prosperity Alliance hits Crane for voting “against funding our border security” and opposing money for border agents, ICE and a border wall. It urges constituents to call their representative to urge him to change course.

Good has a primary challenge from state Sen. John McGuire in his Virginia district. In South Carolina, Mace will go up against Catherine Templeton, a former gubernatorial candidate. And Crane, the lone freshman to vote against McCarthy, will face former Yavapai County Supervisor Jack Smith in Arizona. All three have been elected with significant support from groups that McCarthy helped fund, including the Congressional Leadership Fund and the House GOP campaign arm.

This is likely an opening salvo for McCarthy allies. The ad campaign also targets other members, including Rep. Marcy Kaptur, a Democrat in a competitive Ohio seat.

So far in the second half of April, the American Prosperity Alliance has spent nearly $330,000 against Mace, nearly $160,000 against Good, roughly $218,000 against Crane and $150,000 against Kaptur, according to data from AdImpact, a media tracking firm.

Sen. J.D. Vance on Wednesday encouraged a group of House Republicans to block debate on their own speaker’s foreign aid plan — an uncommon effort by a member of one chamber to sway policy across the Capitol.

Vance (R-Ohio) delivered the remarks Wednesday before the Republican Study Committee, the biggest House GOP caucus, according to three people in the room, who were granted anonymity to speak candidly about the closed-door weekly lunch.

The Ohio conservative argued that apart from pushing through aid to Israel, there’s no reason to move on any of the other aid bills — which includes aid to Ukraine and Taiwan — until House Republicans secure border security victories, one of the three people said.

Vance is one of the Hill’s most active critics of new Ukraine aid, and he joined other conservatives in opposing a border security deal that emissaries from both parties negotiated to hitch a ride on a foreign aid bill. His views got backup during the RSC meeting from Stephen Miller, a former senior adviser to Donald Trump who was the group’s other speaker.

But while Vance is aligned with many on Speaker Mike Johnson’s right flank, his advice wasn’t particularly well-received by all the House members in the room. Some scoffed at the idea that Vance would try to weigh in on their chamber’s business.

“What does he know” about House procedures, one lawmaker in the room quipped afterward.

The criticism comes as Johnson presses forward with his aid plan as an ouster threat led by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) looms in the background. Earlier this week, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) became the second Republican to join Greene in backing a proposal to boot the speaker, though it’s not clear how soon the duo might try to force a vote on their plan.

Once and if they do, Johnson’s foreign aid plan has increased the likelihood that he would need House Democrats to vote on the floor to save his job.

Johnson’s plan includes five parts. In one group of bills, he aims to pass aid to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan in three separate tranches; a fourth bill would seize Russian assets, hit Iran with sanctions and then trigger a forced TikTok sale. A fifth bill, taken up separately, would include border measures.

House Democrats are still digesting Speaker Mike Johnson‘s four-part foreign aid plan, but are signaling they’re open to helping him move it.

“Let’s make sure everybody gets a chance to see it, socialize the substance of it,” said Rep. Annie Kuster (D-N.H.), chair of the centrist New Democrat Coalition. “It may not look the same, but the pieces of it are the same as the Senate supplemental. So it’s not new to us, in that sense.”

Without Democratic help, the separate aid bills for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan — which together closely mirror a bipartisan, Senate-passed foreign aid bill — have no chance at even coming up for a vote. Johnson has said he’ll move the package through the regular process, meaning it has to leap over two major hurdles before passage: the Rules Committee and a procedural vote on the floor.

If all three conservatives on the Rules panel unite with Democrats to oppose it, the bills won’t make it to the floor. And even if the bundle of bills does get through that committee, enough Republicans have already signaled they’ll tank the so-called rule vote on the floor, which would block all four bills.

That’s where Democrats come in. Typically, the majority party is solely responsible for passing rules, both in committee and on the floor. Democrats are bristling that they’re being called upon to help Republicans, but they’re desperate to unstick Ukraine cash, after Johnson has refused to move on a bipartisan Senate-passed foreign aid bill for months.

President Joe Biden quickly backed the legislation in a statement, saying he’d sign the bills into law “immediately” if they were passed.

“I strongly support this package to get critical support to Israel and Ukraine, provide desperately needed humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza, and bolster security and stability in the Indo-Pacific,” he said.

Asked after the release of bill text about helping Johnson, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a brief interview he’d talk to his members first: “We haven’t met as a caucus yet to discuss.”

But one top Democrat has already signaled she supports the package. Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, came out in support of the three bills sending aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan: “After House Republicans dragged their feet for months, we finally have a path forward to provide support for our allies and desperately needed humanitarian aid.”

Conservative resistance to the package quickly solidified as Johnson released text of the three primary foreign aid bills Wednesday afternoon. House Freedom Caucus Chair Bob Good called on “every true conservative” to block the package. Heritage Action, the political arm of the influential conservative Heritage Foundation, is expected to notify Hill offices of their opposition to the procedural vote on the foreign aid bills, encouraging a rare “Key Vote ‘No'” to lawmakers.

Johnson has promised another vote, packaged separately from the others, on a border bill in an effort to appease conservatives, a tactic that largely failed. And he’s moving carefully with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) threatening to force a vote to oust him, which Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) endorsed after Johnson detailed his foreign aid plan earlier this week.

Reps. Chip Roy (R-Texas), Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) and Massie met with Johnson on Wednesday to push him to add border into the foreign aid package, instead of as a separate bill. The three conservatives each sit on the Rules Committee, and if they join with Democrats in the committee to oppose it, they can block the foreign aid package. Roy said on X that he would vote against the rule, while Massie declined to say after the meeting if he would support the rule, which sets up the parameters of the House debate.

Norman indicated after the meeting that without changes to Johnson’s plan he would also vote against the rule: “I can’t support that unless something else changes.”

Johnson is certain to need Democratic help on the floor, where he can only afford to lose two Republicans at full attendance and still clear votes on partisan lines.

There is one escape hatch, which Democrats would prefer to take if they can get the requisite GOP support. The minority party has been sitting for the last month on a so-called discharge petition, a longshot procedural tactic that would force a vote on the House floor if a majority of members back it. One on the Senate-passed foreign aid bill currently has 195 signatures, but only one Republican has signed on so far: former Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.).

Republicans who support that bill have been reluctant to openly circumvent their leadership or provoke the ire of some conservatives by signing on to the petition. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) threatened in a Tuesday night GOP meeting to campaign against moderates in their general elections if they move forward with a discharge petition, according to a person familiar with the situation. He also reiterated his opposition to ousting Johnson, that person said.

But if Johnson’s plan fails, some GOP centrists predict the discharge petition will start seeing support from their side.

“If this collapses, a bunch of us will have no other choice” but to sign on, Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) said in a brief interview. “It’s probably the only choice we have.”

Olivia Beavers contributed to this report.

A Boeing engineer turned whistleblower told senators Wednesday that the company repeatedly sidelined and threatened him when he raised safety concerns about their aircraft, saying: “I was told, frankly, to shut up.”

Sam Salehpour, who is still employed by the company, said he even faced physical threats after raising concerns.

“My boss said, ‘I would have killed someone who said what you said in a meeting,’” he told the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Salehpour, who first told his story to the New York Times, testified as a whistleblower after he said the company dismissed his concerns for more than three years.

“I was ignored, I was told not to create delays, I was told, frankly, to shut up,” Salehpour said, comparing the company’s safety culture to NASA before the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.

“The attitude from the highest level is just to push out a definitive part, regardless of what it is,” he said.

Boeing declined to comment on Salehpour’s remarks, but it has repeatedly expressed that its regulatory protocols encourage all employees to speak up when issues arise, saying that “retaliation is strictly prohibited at Boeing.”

Boeing has been under intense scrutiny for its manufacturing practices since a door panel blew off a Boeing 737 MAX airplane over Oregon in January. Salehpour worked on two different planes, the Boeing 787 and 777, but senators called the hearing on company-wide safety culture.

Ed Pierson, a former Boeing engineer who is now executive director of the Foundation for Aviation Safety, also said that records of who installed the door plug, which federal safety investigators have been unable to obtain from Boeing, do in fact exist, and accused Boeing of engaging in a “criminal cover-up.”

Jennifer Homendy, the head of the independent National Transportation Safety Board which is investigating the Alaska Airlines door plug incident, said last month that Boeing refused to provide records about who specifically installed the door panel, and she reiterated last week that she was still waiting. Homendy told lawmakers last month that Boeing CEO David Calhoun told her that the company “has no records of the work being performed.”

But Pierson said an internal whistleblower provided those documents to him and he had in turn given them to the FBI.

“The records do in fact exist,” Pierson said. “I know this because I personally passed them to the FBI.”

The FBI did not respond to a request for comment. Boeing declined to comment on Pierson’s testimony.

Among Salehpour’s accusations involve shoddy seal work on the 787 Dreamliner, which he repeatedly raised to management, after which he was transferred to another plane model, the 777 — where he found even more problems.

Salehpour said that he found Boeing failed to properly fill gaps in the body of the 787, a process called shimming, 98.7 percent of the time. He also said debris ended up in those gaps 80 percent of the time.

On the Boeing 777, Salehpour said he witnessed workers jumping on pieces of the plane to make them fit together, a process he called the “Tarzan effect.” These issues could result in the body of the planes weakening over time, he testified.

“I’m here today because I felt that I must come forward because I do not want to see another 787 or 777 crash,” Salehpour said.

Oriana Pawlyk contributed to this report.

The Biden administration is working to reassure senators that a key surveillance bill does not broaden the scope of those who can be targeted, hoping to push through reauthorization legislation before the weekend as critics threaten to derail quick passage.

With a Friday deadline to avoid a lapse in Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows warrantless surveillance of foreign targets, House members added a provision to cover new types of data service providers. Though the administration and supporters on Capitol Hill say it’s necessary to keep up with advances in technology over the past 15 years, the inclusion has prompted critics to warn the new bill amounts to “a vast expansion of surveillance authorities,” as Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said Tuesday.

In a memo distributed to Senate offices and obtained by POLITICO, the administration argues the legislation “does not expand the scope” of who can be targeted and includes “explicit limitations” on how the updated law can be used, including hotels, restaurants and peoples’ houses. White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Wednesday the language “is a technical fix designed to account for changing technological realities.”

In a statement, Assistant Attorney General for National Security Matthew Olsen said “any assertion that the bill would authorize the targeting of small businesses, schools, or places of worship is simply false and represents a basic misunderstanding of the rules that govern the program.“

“The House-passed legislation does not at all expand the scope of who can be targeted under Section 702, which is strictly limited to non-Americans overseas. The technical update to the definition of the types of communications providers covered by the law is necessary to ensure foreign adversaries cannot exploit technology advances as a safe haven to communicate using U.S. infrastructure,” Olson added.

The legislation marks a key clash between the intelligence community and its supporters and longtime skeptics of government surveillance programs. At the moment, critics of the programs have the leverage to force a brief shutdown in protest of the legislation in front of them.

Wyden prebutted much of the government’s arguments in his floor speech Tuesday, declaring that “anyone who votes to give the government vast powers under the premise that intelligence agencies won’t actually use it is being shockingly naive. “ He said the “random exceptions” in the bill means that there will be a “huge range of companies and individuals to spy for the government.”

The Senate will take its first vote on the FISA legislation on Thursday and will need to cut a deal on debate time and amendments to avoid a technical lapse of the program’s warrantless surveillance authority, which is prohibited from targeting Americans but incidentally does sweep up communications between Americans and foreign surveillance targets. Critics say there’s little rush since a court just renewed the government’s surveillance authorities into 2025, though the bill’s supporters say this is not the time to risk potential intelligence failures.

The Senate could in theory amend the bill to strip out the provision, but there’s likely not enough time to send it back to the House. Either way, the administration and intelligence community supporters will probably have to beat back several amendments to win passage of the bill, including efforts to require a warrant to search the database for communications with Americans, bar the collection of Americans’ information altogether and prohibit the government from purchasing information about Americans.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said he hopes the Senate will move to dismiss the impeachment trial against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, as Republicans wrestle with whether to sign off on his offer to hold debate and votes Wednesday.

Senate Republicans have not signed off on an agreement to debate the impeachment and hold several key votes, potentially leading to little other than procedural votes and a quick dismissal. One key offer from Schumer: Allowing the GOP to vote on motions to hold a full trial and create a trial committee, key GOP priorities that won’t get roll call votes without agreement among all 100 senators.

“There’s still a few objections to that approach. … We’re coming up against the witching hour here. I don’t think we have a clear path forward, I don’t think that proposal’s been signed off on,” Senate Minority Whip John Thune said in an interview Wednesday. Without an agreement, “you wouldnt have anything locked in. It would be less structured.”

Senators reconvene for the trial at 1 p.m. on Wednesday to be sworn-in as jurors. Whether Republicans accept Schumer’s deal at that time is still up in the air, but it is crystal clear Democrats intend to end the impeachment action on Wednesday and move on to keeping a key intelligence authority from expiring Saturday.

“To validate this gross abuse by the House would be a grave mistake and could set a dangerous precedent for the future. For the sake of the Senate’s integrity and to protect impeachment for those rare cases we truly need it, senators should dismiss today’s charges,” Schumer said.

Wednesday’s Boeing safety inquest in the Senate opened with lawmakers blaming a rash of incidents on Boeing planes on not only what they called the company’s poor safety culture, but also on the Federal Aviation Administration for letting it happen on their watch.

During a Senate Commerce Committee hearing Wednesday to probe what’s going wrong at Boeing after a 737 MAX 9 door plug blew out mid-air and amid growing whistleblower claims, Sen Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), chair of the aviation panel, skewered the FAA for being too hands-off in overseeing a program that essentially allows manufacturers like Boeing to self-certify their aircraft, with FAA oversight.

Testifying before the panel, Tracy Dillinger, Manager for Safety Culture and Human Factors at NASA who has been involved in safety reviews, said one of the foundational practices of a functional safety culture at a company like Boeing is understanding who is ultimately responsible for safety. She said she had reviewed Boeing employee surveys that showed that 95 percent of those responding did not know who their chief safety officer was.

Duckworth said it’s easy to see why employees are confused when “the FAA fails to take action in response to bad behavior.”

“It sends an unmistakable message” that bad behavior is acceptable, Duckworth said, adding the FAA in some cases sat on its hands and allowed the misconduct to happen.

Javier de Luis of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s department of aeronautics and astronautics, testifying before the panel, said he felt the self-certification program, which Congress has expanded over the years, had gone too far.

“For the last 20 years, every FAA authorization act has pushed more and more responsibility over the fence to the manufacturer side, usually with the understandable objective of increasing efficiency and productivity,” de Luis, who lost his sister on board a 737 MAX 8 crash in 2019 in Ethiopia, told the senators. “The two 737 Max crashes showed that the pendulum had swung too far.”

He noted that a 2020 law Congress passed responding to that crash and another in 2018 mandated some changes to the way the FAA’s delegated-oversight program works, and was at least a response “trying to correct this imbalance.”

A congressionally mandated panel examining Boeing’s safety practices following the 2018 and 2019 crashes that killed 346 people found that employees were also hesitant to report safety concerns for fear of retaliation.

Even after Boeing restructured its self-certification program to create more independence between business, design and engineering units — and Congress passed legislation to strengthen whistleblower protection for workers — the reorganization “still allows opportunities for retaliation to occur,” the report said, “particularly with regards to salary and furlough ranking.”

Sen. Maria Cantwell, chair of the committee, said that 2020 law did help curtail “the opportunities as your report is saying for retaliation, [but] we still are seeing that interference is occurring.”

“This is unacceptable,” she said.

Speaker Mike Johnson has released a specific outline of his four-part proposal to send aid to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan, moving ahead with the plan that’s fueling fresh conservative demands for his ouster.

Aid to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan is split into three different bills, with a fourth that would seize Russian assets, force a TikTok sale and impose sanctions on Iran. Bill text on the first three is expected imminently, while language on the fourth should come later Wednesday. Some of the assistance would be conditioned as a loan, along with mandates for military strategy and oversight.

After meeting late into the night Tuesday with various House GOP lawmakers, Johnson has decided to also move to tee up debate on a separate border security measure, which includes what GOP leaders are calling “core components” of H.R. 2, the House-passed border security and immigration bill favored by conservatives. A vote to debate that package will not be linked to the foreign aid measures, however, and amendments will be allowed.

The fate of the newly unveiled bills — and of the speaker’s leadership tenure — will become clearer as the week goes on, with Johnson facing conflicting demands for action to support U.S. allies after Iran’s weekend attack on Israel. The speaker’s first test will be whether he can get enough votes to tee up floor debate on the foreign aid measures that several House hardliners have already threatened to block.

Despite the border component of the deal, conservatives are already vowing to block the bills. House Freedom Caucus Chair Bob Good (R-Va.) called on “every true conservative” to tank the package before text was released, and Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said that he would oppose bringing them to the floor.

“The Republican Speaker of the House is seeking a rule to pass almost $100 billion in foreign aid — while unquestionably, dangerous criminals, terrorists, & fentanyl pour across our border. The border ‘vote’ in this package is a watered-down dangerous cover vote,” Roy posted on X.

Releasing text of the bills would technically start a 72-hour countdown ahead of final passage, if the speaker upholds his commitment to a House rule granting lawmakers three full days to review bill text. In a text to House lawmakers midday Wednesday, the speaker said the House will have time “for a robust amendment process,” predicting final passage Saturday evening.

Congressional Democrats and the White House are quietly watching the speaker try to get through his latest predicament, after Johnson sat for nine weeks on a bipartisan $95 billion foreign assistance package that the Senate passed overwhelmingly in February. Seeking Democratic help in getting aid bills through the House would likely further inflame conservative calls to fire the speaker; Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) has signed onto Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) ouster proposal.

When Johnson announced broad contours of the plan Monday night, he predicted that the House would pass foreign aid before departing for a previously scheduled week-long recess.

“We had a lot of heavy lifts here in the House in the last couple of months, and we finally got to this priority — it is a priority. I do expect that this will be done this week,” the speaker said. “And we’ll be able to leave knowing that we’ve done our job here.”

An ample number of conservatives have signaled concerns over the fact that Johnson is likely to need at least some Democratic votes to begin debate on the bills.

Democrats, led by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, have urged Johnson to grant a vote to the Senate package, which would go straight to President Joe Biden’s desk if it passes.

Some efforts to court Democrats are already underway. Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), who led talks to craft a bipartisan foreign aid proposal, said he’s spoken to centrist Democrats in the Problem Solvers Caucus about voting in support of teeing up debate, to make up for Republican defections.

Democrats aren’t committing to help Johnson out yet on the process, signaling their votes will be dependent on the content of the bills.

“I’ll follow leadership on this,” said Washington Rep. Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee. “If they get this together, and it’s sensible and stuff that the White House and Hakeem can live with, then yeah, I’d vote for that rule.”

Caitlin Emma contributed to this report.

On Wednesday morning, Capitol Hill was still waiting on Speaker Mike Johnson’s highly anticipated foreign aid package.

He’s pledged to give his colleagues 72 hours to review the four separate bills before voting on them, which would push action into the weekend — right before a planned Passover recess packed with CODEL trips.

The foreign aid package’s separate bills would send aid to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan. A fourth could include a package of related measures, including a lend-lease deal for military aid, a ban on TikTok in the U.S. and provisions to sell off assets seized from Russian oligarchs.

The plan, as it stands before lawmakers can get their hands on text, is to try to pass each as stand-alone measures before packaging them together and shipping them to the Senate.

Johnson spent Tuesday meeting with different factions and cross-sections of the Republican Conference, hearing out frustrations and trying to sell his plan to colleagues. Some of the four foreign aid bills — especially the Ukraine measure — would garner hefty Democratic support. That’s a prospect many conservatives are uncomfortable with. They also want border security policies included in the package.

The foreign aid bid comes not only with high stakes for foreign allies, but also for Johnson, as he tries to keep his job amid threats from within his conference.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) joined Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) effort to oust Johnson from the speakership on Tuesday, but the pair still don’t have a timeline for acting on their motion to vacate.

Likely not the trial of the century: Senators will be sworn in Wednesday as jurors in the impeachment trial of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, though it could be relatively quick.

There were negotiations on Tuesday to possibly allow for a few hours of debate before Democrats vote to dismiss the articles of impeachment. But nothing was finalized Tuesday evening. Plus, it would require unanimous consent, which means any naysayer could tank an agreement.

There will be a rare packed chamber in the Senate on Wednesday starting at 1 p.m., with senators all in their seats, for the Mayorkas proceedings.