Senate Republicans and a handful of Democrats blocked a second attempt Thursday to advance a bill designed to slow migration at the southern U.S. border, with fewer senators supporting the bill than in February when the measure was brought up for a vote as part of a foreign aid package. 

The procedural vote failed 43-50, well short of the 60 votes needed to survive. Several senators flipped their votes from February when the drive to pass foreign aid to Ukraine and other U.S. allies helped bolster support for the border bill. 

Three of the four Republicans who voted for the bill earlier this year flipped their votes to “no” on Thursday, including Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford, who spent months negotiating the details of the border bill with Sens. Chris Murphy, Connecticut Democrat, and Kyrsten Sinema, Arizona independent. Ms. Sinema also reversed course and voted against the bill Thursday.

Mr. Lankford told The Washington Times he changed positions because Democrats decided to bring the bill up for another vote solely for political messaging purposes, rather than having conversations about how they could change senators’ minds and win enough support to pass it. He said the failed vote won’t boost vulnerable Democratic incumbents struggling with messaging on the border issue.

“Number one, it’s Memorial Day week. No one’s paying attention right now,” he said. “Honestly, they’re not thinking about this at all. And the other one is, no one’s going to expect it to be different. I think the story will be that it will have fewer votes ‘yes’ this time than it did last time.”

President Biden responded to the ​second bipartisan vote to kill the bill​ by chiding Republicans.

“Congressional Republicans do not care about securing the border or fixing America’s broken immigration system. If they did, they would have voted for the toughest border enforcement in history,” he said in a statement.

GOP Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Mitt Romney of Utah also flipped their votes from “yes” in February to “no” on Thursday. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska was the only Republican to support the bill on both votes.

“Everybody knows that it’s just a messaging bill from Chuck Schumer that will have no impact,” Mr. Romney told the Times, referring to the Democratic Senate majority leader. “The American people already know who’s responsible for the mess at the border, and this little bill is not going to change that.”

Ms. Collins said Mr. Schumer’s scheduling of the procedural vote on Thursday afternoon as senators readied to leave town for the Memorial Day weekend and a week off underscored that it was solely a political gesture.

“We do need to do a serious border security bill, and I thought we were on the verge of it last time, even though I wanted some changes,” she said. “But it’s obvious that this is unfortunately not a serious attempt to make law.”

The bill would tighten standards for migrants seeking asylum in the U.S. and implement a system to temporarily shut down the border if crossings reach a certain threshold, among other provisions.

Democratic support for the bill also dropped, with two who previously supported it voting ‘no’ this time.

“I have a lot of frustrations that the Republicans have walked away,” New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, one of the Democrats who flipped his vote, told The Times. “The betrayal to me is pretty extraordinary.”

Mr. Booker also has personal objections to some of the migration restrictions in the bill and the fact that it does not include any effort to legalize certain classes of undocumented immigrants.

The other Democrat who flipped positions was Sen. Laphonza R. Butler. 

Mr. Murphy argued that a drop in Democratic support actually strengthens their point that the bill is designed to get to a solution rather than score political points. 

“The fact that we will not have unity in the Democratic caucus makes perfectly clear the fact that this is a bipartisan bill that involves Democrats making real compromise and sacrifice,” he told The Times.

Both parties argued political motivations stood in the way of any real effort to fix the border crisis. 

Republicans complained that Democrats were only holding the vote to prop up Mr. Biden and their vulnerable incumbents seeking to look tough on border security – a ploy they promised wouldn’t work. Voters know that the president has the executive authority to address the border crisis, and that his decision to rescind Trump-era restrictions is what led to record border crossings, GOP senators argue.

“Don’t listen to what he says, watch what he does,” Sen. Roger Marshall, Kansas Republican, said of Mr. Biden. “The blood of hundreds of thousands of Americans are on his hands. And whether it’s Jon Tester or any other of the Democrats that are up in purple states, the American people are going to hold them accountable, and there’s nothing they can do to bring those people’s lives back.”

The administration has at times waffled over how much authority Mr. Biden has to fix the border. But on Wednesday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre acknowledged that the president could take unilateral action, while maintaining that Congress should act. 

“Why should he have to do it unilaterally?” she said. “Why shouldn’t we do it in a legislative way?”

Democrats said Republicans were the ones who wanted to negotiate a border bill only to walk away after former President Donald Trump urged them to oppose it so he could run for a second term on restoring tough immigration restrictions Mr. Biden overturned.

“People want us to get things done. People want us to come together,” Mr. Schumer said in floor remarks Thursday. “And when they hear that the only reason Republicans backed away from this bill is, not that it wasn’t strong enough, but that Donald Trump said he wanted chaos at the border, they don’t like that.”

Although the border vote failed to advance, Democratic senators up for reelection in swing states — Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Jon Tester of Montana, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Jacky Rosen of Nevada and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin — can tout their support for it on the campaign trail. 

Although they mostly downplayed the political motivation behind the vote, they acknowledged that it was an opportunity to prove their mettle on the issue. 

“If you say you care about border security, this is a great opportunity to support a bill that is the toughest border bill in 25 years,” Mr. Casey told The Times. “It’s bipartisan, supported by the border patrol union. This is the moment.”

Mr. Casey and Mr. Baldwin said addressing the problems at the border is important to their constituents back home, even though their states are thousands of miles away. 

“We need to restore order and have a secure southern border,” Ms. Baldwin said. “And it’s particularly resonant in Wisconsin because of the flow of fentanyl that has killed so many of my constituents and devastated families.”

Mr. Brown, likewise, said he was taking the vote seriously, unlike Republicans who he said blocked the border bill earlier this year on Trump’s behalf only to complain about politics now.  

“So why would you put stock in their political positions instead of actually voting on something substantive like this?” he said.  

Sen. Gary Peters, who chairs Senate Democrats’ campaign arm, said the fact that Republicans wouldn’t even vote to begin debate on the bill, which would have provided a forum in which they could have offered alternative solutions, “shows that they’re basically hypocrites when it comes to this issue.”

As for the political messaging, Mr. Peters acknowledged the vote will make clear that Democrats who voted to advance the bill “are clearly on the side of stronger border protection.”

• Lindsey McPherson can be reached at lmcpherson@washingtontimes.com.