To have gotten through the Republican filibuster last February, the painstakingly-negotiated bipartisan compromise on aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan tied to tougher border measures would have needed 60 votes. It only got 50. The only Republicans who supported it were James Lankford (who basically wrote the border provisions), Susan Collins, Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski. The rest of the Senate Republicans heeded Trump’s social media demand to shit-can it entirely.
Now that looks like it may be coming back to haunt Republicans as the Democratic Party starts using their opposition to the solution against them… with ads like this billboard in the Rio Grande valley of Texas.
Yesterday, NBC News reported that the White House is seizing on remarks by McConnell that Señor T was “resistant to accepting any bipartisan compromise to toughen border security laws. The comments from McConnell came hours before the Senate passed a sweeping $95 billion foreign aid package providing assistance to Ukraine and Israel, capping months of internal GOP infighting that culminated in no immigration add-ons.
White House spokesperson Andrew Bates told NBC News that “This week Senator McConnell explicitly said why the toughest, fairest bipartisan border legislation in modern American history is stalled: ‘our nominee for president did not seem to want us to do anything at all.’ After President Biden worked with Republicans and Democrats in the Senate to assemble a landmark deal that secured the border and cracked down on fentanyl, congressional Republicans have been direct about why many of them sided with drug cartels and human smugglers over the Border Patrol Union and the Chamber of Commerce— because Donald Trump told them to… President Biden will not allow extreme Republican officials to endanger American communities. He will keep fighting for the toughest, fairest border security deal in decades.”
Trump has made the border his top issue and it generally works for him and the GOP— although… Democrat Tom Suozzi turned the narrative on it’s head and flipped a red seat on Long Island blue in the most recent congressional election. Biden is trying to do the same thing, hoping “to neutralize his vulnerability by arguing that Trump doesn’t care about securing the border and is only seeking to weaponize the issue for political gain. The new White House statement is an indication that Biden’s team plans to continue leaning into that argument.”
McConnell told reporters on Tuesday, hours before the impending passage of the bill, that Trump had a role in delaying the passage of Ukraine aid because of his resistance to a bipartisan border deal.
“I think the former president had sort of mixed views on it. We all felt that the border was a complete disaster, myself included,” McConnell said. “First there was an effort to make law, which requires you to deal with Democrats, and then a number of our members thought it wasn’t good enough. And then our nominee for president didn’t seem to want us to do anything at all. That took months to work our way through it. So we ended up doing the supplemental that was originally proposed, which dealt with not all problems— it didn’t solve the border problem. But certainly addressed the growing threats at the moment.”
Biden and Democrats initially rejected GOP demands to include border security in a foreign aid package. But eventually they backed down and struck a deal with McConnell’s designee, Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., who called it “by far the most conservative border security bill in four decades.”
The bill they released would have raised the bar for seeking asylum and included a host of triggers to turn away new arrivals, but it had none of the legalization provisions Democrats had initially demanded as part of any immigration deal.
Trump pressured Republicans to kill the bill anyway, saying on social media that “we need a Strong, Powerful, and essentially ‘PERFECT’ Border and, unless we get that, we are better off not making a Deal.”
In a separate post, he wrote: “I do not think we should do a Border Deal, at all, unless we get EVERYTHING needed to shut down the INVASION of Millions & Millions of people, many from parts unknown, into our once great, the soon to be great again, Country!”
Despite McConnell championing the bipartisan bill, it was blocked by a Republican filibuster, as only four GOP senators voted to advance it in February, with the rest arguing that it fell short.
Sen. Chris Murphy(D-CT), the chief Democratic negotiator on the border deal, said the aid package “took way too long.”
“This all took way too long. But if you’re a Democrat, and in the end, you got the full Ukraine, Israel, humanitarian aid— and you fundamentally expose Republicans on their most critical issue, immigration? Query whether that’s a political deal worth taking,” Murphy said in an interview. “We got Ukraine done. And we improved our position dramatically on the issue that we were most vulnerable on in the election: immigration.”
Since then, the Biden administration has been mulling executive actions to deter illegal migration, but any unilateral steps would pale in comparison to what Congress can do.
Widespread resistance to immigration is a relatively new phenomenon. Until the 19th Century, immigration was generally encouraged and it was widely recognized that the net effect of immigration was healthy economically, with migrants filling labor shortages, starting businesses, paying taxes and driving innovation and entrepreneurship and with migrant workers taking on jobs in sectors such as agriculture, construction, healthcare and technology, where there were shortages of native-born workers. Don’t waste your time trying to convince a MAGAt but immigration has enriched American culture and society by bringing diverse perspectives, traditions and cuisines here. Not that you’ll find a MAGAt agreeing, but immigrants have made immense contributions to the visual arts, literature, music, cuisine, and all the other aspects of American cultural life, not to mention, medicine, technology, science, etc. Albert Einstein was a refugee from Germany; if not for him, we might have had fascists in the White House long before Trump.
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