Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) has made supporting the war in Ukraine a signature policy priority, but his efforts have been complicated by fellow Republicans, including former President Trump, who are moving the goalposts on the issue.
McConnell appeared to be on solid footing when he told President Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in phone calls before Thanksgiving that Biden’s funding request for Ukraine would not pass the Senate “without a credible border solution.”
“I did make it clear to both of them that we have to have a credible solution to the wide-open border in order to get a bill … across the Senate floor,” he said at the time. “I hope they understood the message.”
But at a special meeting of the Republican conference Wednesday afternoon, McConnell acknowledged, according to a GOP senator in the room, that “the political situation has drifted.”
A big reason is Trump, who in the interim has won the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, tightening his grip on the GOP.
Republican senators say Trump is now telling GOP lawmakers he wants to deny President Biden a victory and run on the issue — a motivation that Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) on Thursday blasted as “appalling.”
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said Republicans would make a serious mistake by walking away from the border deal in the belief that it will somehow help Trump beat Biden in the November election.
“If we fail to get this passed, I’m going to file exactly the same bill if Trump wins and we have a majority of the Senate. I’ll guarantee you that everybody who’s against it. It’s all about politics and not having the courage to respectfully disagree with President Trump and tell him: ‘This will help him.’ He has requested it before,” Tillis said.
“I didn’t come here to have a president as a boss or a candidate as a boss. I came here to pass good, solid policy that will help a president who is serious [about] securing the border,” he said.
Senate and House Republicans at one time seemed unified about attaching border security language to an emergency defense spending bill funding Ukraine, Israel and the defense of Taiwan. But that has steadily shifted.
GOP senators who support the bill say the biggest obstacle to passing any border security legislation is Trump, who in 2018 urged Congress to act on border legislation.
Trump said in November 2018 the “only long-term solution to the crisis and the only way to ensure the endurance of our nation as a sovereign country is for Congress to overcome open borders obstruction.”
Trump complained at the time that caravans of illegal migrants were drawn to the country by “Democrat-backed laws” and “left-wing judicial rulings” that tied his hands as president.
“It’s a disgrace we have to put up with it,” he said.
Five years later, Trump is arguing against action by Congress, saying the emerging bill is insufficient and calling on Republicans to reject it, without seeing all of its details.
“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,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Some Republican senators think some of their conservative colleagues have also shifted on the need to have a border bill, to align themselves with Trump and take shots at their leadership.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) told Fox News’s Jacqui Heinrich this week: “We don’t need a border bill.”
But in 2019, when Trump was president, he argued Congress needed to act to help him secure the border.
“There is a crisis at our border,” he tweeted in June of that year. “We cannot remain [idle as] the [Customs and Border Patrol] works tirelessly to protect our border. Congress needs to do its job & provide CBP the support they need.”
McConnell has argued the emerging border deal is the only opportunity in the foreseeable future to get any Democratic votes to reform the nation’s asylum laws and give the president more authority to detain and deport migrants, arguing such proposals wouldn’t get any Democratic support under a Republican president.
Trump, when he was president, even acknowledged he couldn’t get any bipartisan support in Congress for border security reform.
“It’s open border obstruction. No votes. You can come up with the greatest border plan, the greatest immigration plan. You won’t get one vote from a Democrat,” Trump said five years ago.
The emergency defense supplemental bill would include more than $14 billion to secure the border in addition to reforming asylum policy and giving the president enhanced authority to detain and deport migrants.
Senate Republicans who support a package funding Ukraine and reforming the nation’s asylum laws feel let down by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who has consulted with Trump frequently on the border crisis, and warned colleagues in a letter Friday that the Senate bill — unless dramatically changed — wouldn’t even get a vote in the House.
“If rumors about the contents of the draft proposal are true, it would have been dead on arrival in the House anyway,” Johnson said in the letter.
GOP senators see that as a departure from what he told GOP colleagues in early December that making changes to U.S. border policy would be their “hill to die on” in negotiations over funding for Ukraine and Israel.
Johnson also told President Biden and other congressional leaders at a White House meeting on Jan. 17 that “we must have change at the border, substantive policy change.”
The House passed H.R. 2, the Secure the Border Act, in May, which would have required Customs and Border Patrol to maintain their staffing at 22,000 agents, required the Biden administration to restart construction of the southern border wall, and end the policy of paroling migrants into the country, which critics call “catch and release.”
Johnson told Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) in a phone call on Nov. 30 that he could only pass Ukraine funding if border security language was attached to it.
The Speaker insisted on the call that the House-passed bill, H.R. 2, be part of the package, but Schumer informed him at that time the House bill was a “non-starter” and would have to be modified.
Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), the lead Republican negotiator on the Senate’s border security package, the following day, Dec. 1, put on the table proposals that pretty much mirrored H.R. 2.
After weeks of painstaking negotiations, Lankford said he is very close to a bipartisan deal that he thinks can secure the support of half the Senate Republican Conference. But now Johnson, who is in close touch with Trump, is declaring it dead in the House based on the details that have leaked out.
That turn of events is exasperating senators who worked for months to extract border concessions from the White House and Senate Democrats.
Lankford said McConnell acknowledged during Wednesday’s meeting what many Senate Republicans now recognize: Presidential politics are driving Republican lawmakers in both chambers to oppose a bill they may have supported last year.
“He was being very clear. Hey, we need to acknowledge this is part of the dialogue and there are some people that oppose the bill based on the presidential politics issue rather than the crisis that’s actually occurring at the border,” Lankford said.
The Oklahoma senator said McConnell read quotes from Trump while he was president asking for a change in the nation’s asylum laws
“That’s one of the things that’s in this bill, that’s been needed and will be needed by every president,” Lankford said.