Liam Conner
washington — The Senate is expected to vote on Thursday on a bipartisan border security measure which Republicans blocked earlier this year after former President Donald Trump announced his opposition to it.
The bill will likely fail a second time, but Democrats will try to use Republican resistance to shift public opinion in their favor as polls show voters have been critical of President Biden’s handling of immigration. Border security has been a central theme of the Republican platform ahead of the November elections.
“We’ll see who is serious about wanting to fix the border… and those who would rather just talk about it,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a speech Wednesday.
Sen. Brian Schatz, a Hawaii Democrat, argued that Republicans who vote against the measure “lose the right to discuss the border and turn it into a partisan political issue.”
“I’m angry because I’ve gotten messages from my colleagues on the Republican side saying, ‘Look, you need to get serious about the border,'” Schatz said during a news conference Wednesday with some of his Democratic colleagues. “Some of the Republicans I respect most were really forceful with us, and so we listened. We’ve developed legislation that I don’t love, but I know is tough enough to get the job done. because Donald Trump told them to.”
The law of the border
Images by Alex Wong/Getty
After months of negotiations, Republicans and Democrats reached a compromise in February, it would have been the first comprehensive review of border security policy in decades. It would have given the president broad powers to restrict illegal border crossings and tighten asylum rules, among other provisions.
Republicans had long insisted the measure was necessary to support additional aid to Ukraine. But Trump urged his allies to vote against it and the vote fell short of the 60 votes needed to advance in the Senate. Congress has since approved more aid to Ukrainewith Republican support, as part of a broader foreign aid package.
On Monday, Biden spoke with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky, and House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, and told them to “stop playing politics and take action quickly to pass this bipartisan border legislation,” according to a White House summary of conversations.
House Republican leadership said Monday that the bill was “dead on arrival“in the Lower Chamber, in the unlikely event of it being able to leave the Senate.
The compromise measure was negotiated by Senator James Lankford, a Republican from Oklahoma; Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut; and Senator Kyrsten Sinema, an independent from Arizona.
Lankford, one of four Republicans who voted in February to approve the measure, said he will not support it this time, calling it a “support.”
“We’re going to keep working until we actually get this resolved,” he told reporters on Wednesday. “Not just bringing up things that we know won’t go away.”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, rejected criticism that the vote was simply to reinforce Democrats’ messages on the border.
“It’s much more than a message vote. It will have specific, tangible results on border security,” Blumenthal told reporters on Wednesday.
Later that day, in a speech on the floor, Blumenthal said that Republicans refused to support the measure in February because they wanted to campaign on border issues.
“So for fellow Republicans now [to] claim that politics is the reason we are here, well, yes – their politics, their presumptive presidential candidate saying they shouldn’t vote for her because of the political advantage they would have in keeping her as an issue,” he said.
But as Democrats seek to shift blame to Republicans, they are also losing support within their own party. In a statement, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey he said he will not vote for it because it “includes several provisions that will violate Americans’ shared values” and “misses key components that could go much further in solving the serious immigration problems facing our nation.”
Alan He and Kristin Brown contributed reporting.
