Senate Republicans block border deal
Senate Republicans voted down the bipartisan border and foreign aid bill on Wednesday, a deal that they demanded from Democrats but many said it was not enough for them to support.
Senate Republicans voted down the bipartisan border and foreign aid bill on Wednesday, a deal that they demanded from Democrats but many said it was not enough for them to support.
“The border bill is dead. It’s deader than Woodrow Wilson,” said Sen. John Kennedy, (R-LA).
Some Senate Republicans said they rejected it now because they said that President Biden is not using the tools that he has now.
Sen. John Cornyn, (R-TX)
“I think the basic problem is I think many of us finally concluded that there is no new set of laws that would change the president’s approach if you will, to not enforce the current laws,” said Sen. John Cornyn, (R-TX). “So I think it’s basically a lack of trust in the Biden administration to have to deal with the border crisis.”
The vote was 49-50, short of the 60 votes needed to take up the bill.
Many Democrats supported the bill. Some of them said that Republicans are making the wrong decision about the bill and are doing it for political reasons.
“My Republican colleagues are moving away from this and they want to move on and not do this. That would be a mistake and that would be really putting politics above doing the right thing,” said Sen. Mark Kelly, (D-AZ).
“I think we have a lot of people here who are putting themselves and their own reelection over the mission of protecting citizens. That’s all it is. It’s not rocket science. You can see it from a lot of my colleagues and I just I think it’s wrong as a national security person. It’s not protecting people, protecting the homeland. We all have the right to know who’s coming in our country and right now, people are happy to let it go as it is so that they can bash the other side,” said Rep. Elissa Slotkin, (D-MI).
But many Republican senators continued to insist that is the president is the problem and say that getting another deal passed before the presidential election is unlikely.
“Will we be able to revisit it at some point? Perhaps under a new president,” said Sen. John Kennedy, (R-LA). “But President Biden doesn’t care at some point. I mean, if people act like they don’t care, it’s not an act. They just believe in open borders. And this bill would not have solved that.”
The Senate is now planning to vote on a standalone deal that would only support providing foreign aid to Israel, Ukraine and the Indo-Pacific without the border security provisions that were in the original bill.
