Congress becomes disorganized over national security and border funding
The Case for a Border Security Package: Why the House GOP isn’t Going to Pass it? Reply to Schumer, Schumer and McConnell
But it was Republicans who initially demanded border policy changes be paired with Ukraine assistance, and it’s not clear there is appetite among the House GOP for a standalone Ukraine bill.
The deal began to unravel after former President Trump publicly trashed it and House GOP leaders proclaimed it “dead on arrival.” The failure of the package – which includes roughly $20 billion for border provisions, and raises the threshold to meet asylum claims – would cast doubt on Congress’ ability to get anything done on border security or foreign assistance between now and Election Day.
We are trying to figure out what to do next,” he told reporters. People are saying we need more time to go through this.
“Republicans have to decide who do they serve: Donald Trump or the American people?” Biden made a speech at the White House. “Are they here to solve problems, or just weaponize problems for political purposes?”
Biden said that Donald Trump and his “MAGA Republican friends” are the sole reason the border is not secure.
Murphy suggested Wednesday’s procedural vote would likely mark the end of a bipartisan effort to address the border, saying about Republicans, “They walked away from the old plan, they’ll walk away from a new plan.”
The shift has left senators from both parties discussing plans to go back to the original plan from last year to try to pass funding for Ukraine, Israel and humanitarian aid separately.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said he will move to a “Plan B” to move aid to Ukraine and Israel after a procedural vote to advance a bipartisan border security package fails, as expected.
“Well, we’re going to give them both options. We’ll take either one. We just hope they can come to yes on something,” Schumer said. He told reporters he thought the national security funding bill minus the border deal had 60 votes to advance. He vowed there would be a “fair and open process on amendments.”
The top Senate Republican, Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., signaled he favored moving the legislation supporting key allies. He said he took direction from his GOP colleagues to work on a border deal, but once the House speaker called it dead on Arrival, it was time to move on. “I think we have no chance at this point to make a law,” McConnell told reporters Wednesday about the border legislation.
It is not known if the bill would pass the House if it got the Senate’s approval. There is bipartisan support for additional money for both Ukraine and Israel, but a significant bloc of House Republicans oppose additional U.S. assistance for Ukraine. And one hard right lawmaker, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., has threatened to oust the speaker if he allowed a vote to approve any more aid.
Johnson said Tuesday that efforts to help Ukraine “have not been abandoned. The Pentagon has warned that Ukrainian forces are running out of supplies because of the expired U.S. funding.
House Republicans will bring a bill to provide military assistance to Israel in lieu of the larger package. That proposal seems like it’s likely to fail.
In a sign of the ongoing dissent, Republican leaders were forced to skirt a Rules Committee hearing on the bill that might have exposed anger among far-right conservatives. The full House can’t agree on legislation unless the rules are signed off on.
Johnson chose instead to bring the Israel aid bill to the floor under suspension of House rules, which requires a two-thirds vote to pass, and already Democratic leaders and members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus have said they will oppose it.
The House Democratic leadership called the proposal anakedly obvious attempt to undermine the bipartisan deal in the Senate. Meanwhile, the House Freedom Caucus has criticized the bill for its lack of financial offsets.
As the legislative efforts appeared to falter, so too did an entirely partisan effort by House Republicans to impeach Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Several House GOP members expressed doubt about impeachment, leaving leaders hours to try to rally support in order to avoid an embarrassing vote planned for Tuesday evening.
Schumer alluded to the turmoil in the House GOP ranks, saying, “the House is in chaos. It doesn’t behoove the speaker well to block everything because 30 hard-right people just want chaos like Donald Trump.”
The speaker suffered back-to-back embarrassments on Wednesday, when both a resolution to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Aleyandro Mayorkas and a standalone bill providing $18 billion for Israel both failed.
Schumer’s response to a congressional proposal to move the border deal through the Russian-Israeli border border border wall agreement (after Schumer and Schumer)
He said he still hoped they would agree to debate the border deal, but had lined up a back up plan in consultation with the White House to move the billions in money for Ukraine, Israel and humanitarian assistance for civilians impacted in conflict zones.
Schumer called out Republicans who demanded that aid to Ukraine be linked to changes in the Biden administration’s border policies, only to walk away from a bipartisan proposal that a top GOP senator and Republican leadership aides were involved in crafting.
