As House GOP leadership lines up in opposition to a rumored Senate border compromise deal, Republicans in the upper chamber are fracturing over what to do next.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) affirmed his desire to push through some sort of legislation, while carefully treading around House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) hostility to the package.
“It’s important to focus on the other rationale for the supplemental — [we have] two friends in the middle of a huge fight. Israel, Ukraine — they need help,” McConnell told reporters Wednesday.
“Hopefully we can work this border issue out in a way that is satisfactory.”
McConnell also lavished praise on Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), the chief GOP negotiator, who has drawn flack from Republicans in both the House and back home over the reported deal.
Lankford fielded questions from his Senate GOP colleagues behind closed doors earlier Wednesday, according to McConnell.
Although the bill’s text — negotiated by Lankford, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) — has yet to be finalized and made public, a summary seen by The Post last week indicated it would create an authority to automatically reject migrants trying to enter the US when crossing levels eclipse 5,000 a day.
Former President Donald Trump has called on Republicans to tank the agreement, decrying it as a “horrible open borders betrayal of America.”
“It’s certainly not a betrayal. We’ve got to be able to deal with issues in law,” Lankford told CNN when asked about the 45th president’s remarks.
“Does he have access to the bill?” Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) asked CNN in response to Trump. “It hasn’t been released. How does he know it’s a betrayal if he hasn’t read it? … I mean, don’t be ignorant.”
But Trump isn’t alone in expressing dismay.
On Wednesday, Johnson panned the package in an impassioned House floor speech arguing: “From what we’ve heard, this so-called deal does not include transformational policy changes needed to actually stop the border catastrophe.”
“It’s madness. Anything higher than zero [crossings] is surrendering our border, surrendering our sovereignty and our security.”
The White House has accused Trump of seeking to foil the compromise legislation to deprive President Biden of a victory ahead of the Nov. 5 election as voters give the Democrat poor marks on the border crisis in a slew of polls.
Some Senate Republicans appear to agree with that assessment.
“It was the Republicans, I will remind you, that told Democrats months ago that if you want to try to get your Ukraine funding, you’re gonna have to take up the border issue. This is what we asked for,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski told a HuffPost reporter. “Let’s take up what we asked for.”
“I think the border is a very important issue for Donald Trump,” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) complained to CNN last week. “And the fact that he would communicate to Republican senators and congresspeople that he doesn’t want us to solve the border problem because he wants to blame Biden for it is really appalling.”
More conservative Senate Republicans are taking a strong stance against the compromise.
“As bad as we think the bill is, I promise you, it’s worse,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said last week. “This supplemental bill is a kamikaze plane in a box canyon with no exit, headed for a train wreck.”
“James Lankford is smart, hardworking, and knows the issue — he’s on a suicide mission,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) told Fox News Digital this week. “If we cannot force Biden to secure the border, we need to just shut the border down.”
Meanwhile, Murphy has publicly predicted the agreement could hit the Senate floor for a vote as early as next week.
The bill must pick up at least nine Republican votes to overcome a filibuster. Should it clear the upper chamber, it must then pass the House, an increasingly unlikely proposition unless Democrats and moderate Republicans join forces.
Meanwhile, the crisis at the southern border continues to break records.
During fiscal year 2023, which ended Sept. 30, more than 2.47 million migrant encounters were recorded along the Mexico frontier, according to US Customs and Border Protection.
Another 302,034 illegal border-crossers were apprehended in December.