Republicans Unite To Block Border Bill Again As Election Year Fight Heats Up | EUROtoday

WASHINGTON — The Senate rejected for a second time a border safety package deal Republicans helped draft in February earlier than turning round and killing it on the demand of former President Donald Trump, their presumptive 2024 nominee, who didn’t wish to give President Joe Biden an election-year win.

Only Its. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska.) voted to advance the measure on Thursday. Several progressive Democrats additionally opposed the invoice.

The laws would give the president new emergency authority to limit border crossings if each day common migrant encounters attain a sure degree, increase the usual of proof for granting asylum, expedite asylum processing and provides more cash to frame patrol brokers, amongst different measures.

GOP senators accused Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) of taking part in politics by scheduling a vote on a invoice that they had beforehand rejected, an effort they mentioned was actually geared toward bolstering the campaigns of susceptible Democratic incumbents within the Senate.

“This bill today is a prop, it’s a pure messaging vote and a fundraising piece for Democrats to be able to run out and say, ‘See, we want to do border security and those rascally Republicans don’t want to do it,’ which is absolutely absurd,” Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) mentioned Thursday on Newsmax.

Lankford, who helped negotiate the border provisions with a small bipartisan group earlier this 12 months, beforehand complained about his GOP colleagues bailing on a proposed border crackdown that had been endorsed by the conservative Border Patrol union. He didn’t disavow the precise content material of the laws, which he voted for in February and in opposition to on Thursday.

“We need to get together, stop the politics and the messaging and the Democrat fundraising emails that are going out on this, and let’s actually solve the problem,” Lankford mentioned.

Democrats, in the meantime, criticized the GOP for strolling away from probably the greatest possibilities for making bipartisan reforms to handle the inflow of migrants on the border, one thing Republicans have been calling an pressing disaster for years.

“It would have gotten done had Donald Trump not said, ‘I don’t want this done, blame it on me, I want chaos at the border so I can win reelection,’” Schumer mentioned forward of the vote on Thursday.

“That’s not what the American people want. The polling data is clearly on our side,” he argued.

The scenario on the border has surged to the highest of voters’ minds over the previous 12 months, dogging Biden’s presidency and standing within the polls. Democrats are hoping to blunt Republican assaults over the border by highlighting their obstruction to actual reforms in Congress. The White House can be contemplating a sequence of govt orders geared toward stemming the tide of migrants on the border, however any significant motion would require laws.

Next month, Senate Democrats will go on offense by scheduling votes on laws to guard abortion rights and contraceptives. They, too, will seemingly fail. The higher chamber is in full election mode, with little probability of actual legislating between now and till after November.

Several Democrats who supported the border invoice in February when it was hooked up to vital help for Ukraine and Israel voted to not advance it as a standalone measure on Thursday. The new border invoice lacked pathways to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, which had been the prize for Democrats in previous bipartisan immigration payments.

The invoice will “exclude people fleeing violence and persecution from seeking asylum and instead doubles down on failed anti-immigrant policies that encourage irregular immigration,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) mentioned in an announcement.

“This cannot be the new starting point for immigration negotiations,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who opposed the invoice in addition to the earlier model, informed HuffPost.

Meanwhile, Murkowski, who additionally supported the border invoice earlier this 12 months, voiced frustration in regards to the border politicking by calling the entire train “dumb.”

“How would you explain this to an 11-year-old?” Murkowski requested earlier than summing up the GOP flip-flop on the border package deal. “I supported something because I think it was going to help us improve our laws, but we pulled back on that because there were some who thought that it was going to be more important to use it as a message against their opponents, and so we didn’t advance it.”

As a consequence, she mentioned that Democrats are actually “going to use it in a way to perhaps make some of their troubled incumbents in a better place, but they don’t really think that they can pass it, so it’s just messaging on their side.”

“Explain what’s going on to somebody who is not part of this building. They think we’re nuts. They’re like, can you just fix the border?” Murkowski mentioned.