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Is there any better illustration of the ridiculous nature of contemporary politics than what is currently going on in Congress in regard to Ukraine and the border? I started writing this piece partly to keep track of exactly what transpired and when, but even on paper it’s jaw-dropping to follow the brazenness of the flip flops that have taken place in just a few months.
In any case, here are just a few “highlights” of what has happened on this issue since October 2023. Seven stages of absurdity, you might say.
ONE
In October 2023, President Joe Biden asked Congress to pass a bill providing aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, while also funding border security.
This in itself isn’t absurd. Unless you want to give points for Biden thinking a bill might actually pass a dysfunctional Congress. But it did kick off a head-spinning sequence of events, with the end result still to be determined (as of late February).
TWO
After Biden submitted his request, Republicans in Congress indicated they wouldn’t support a foreign aid bill unless it were paired with simultaneous changes to border policy. Biden’s initial ask did include $14 million for additional border patrol agents and immigration judges, but the GOP argued this was insufficient without other measures, such as changes to asylum policy.
As Fox News reported, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said in a December letter to Biden that aid for Ukraine would be "dependent upon enactment of transformative change to our nation's border security laws."
Now, there’s nothing wrong with using leverage to negotiate and try to move policy in your direction, if that’s what Johnson was doing. Though, as some observers suggested at the time, it’s also possible the GOP never wanted to support Ukraine in the first place and insisted on a tougher border bill because they believed Democrats would never negotiate. Whatever the goal, this is where the debate moved.
THREE
To the surprise of many Republicans, the Biden administration and Democrats indeed came to the table and negotiated a bipartisan border deal. While some progressives were dismayed with the outcome, Democrats agreed to what was widely acknowledged as a stringent and conservative border bill.
This, for instance, is what the Wall Street Journal reported about the legislation:
By any honest reckoning, this is the most restrictive migrant legislation in decades … its provisions include long-time GOP priorities that the party’s restrictionists could never have passed only a few months ago. Republicans demanded border measures last year as the price for passing military aid for Ukraine, Israel and Pacific allies. Democrats resisted at first but later agreed to negotiate and have made concessions that are infuriating the open-borders left.
Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina had this to say about the bill:
“To those who think that if President Trump wins, which I hope he does, that we can get a better deal — you won’t … this is a historic moment to reform the border.”
Heck, the bill was even supported by the union for Border Patrol agents, a conservative group that has endorsed Donald Trump for president. The union said the new law would “drop illegal border crossings nationwide.”
Democrats not only agreed to GOP priorities, they also withdrew longstanding demands for more liberal goals, such as a pathway to citizenship for the Dreamers. Why? Because the Biden administration, and a majority of Democrats, badly wanted aid for Ukraine and they legitimately wanted to respond to the growing wrath over the border. This is why some Republicans warned their party they’d never get a better bill … the incentives for Democrats to make this deal won’t exist in the future, especially if Trump were to win this year’s election.
FOUR
Alas, after insisting for months on these changes to border policy, and with a deal now in hand, Congressional Republicans … killed it.
First, Trump came out against the agreement, saying it would be a “Gift to the Radical Left Democrats.”
The House GOP followed Trump’s lead.
Hard-right House Republicans … bluntly say they do not want to give Mr. Biden the opportunity in an election year to claim credit for cracking down on unauthorized immigration.
So yes, they killed the deal they themselves had demanded for the simple reason that they didn’t want to give Biden a win and preferred to be able to continue blaming Democrats for the border.
With Trump and the House on record as opposing the bill, Senate Republicans meekly fell in line and voted to reject the proposed legislation, blocking it from even coming to the floor for debate. Numerous Senators who had seemed to support the legislation just days earlier suddenly came out against it, including Sen. Graham, who’d not only been directly involved in negotiations over the bill but (as noted above) had even lectured his colleagues over the reality that they’d never get a better deal.
So complete was the U-turn that only four GOP Senators voted for the legislation. One of them, Mitt Romney, had this to say in the aftermath:
“… the fact that (Donald Trump) 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."
Outside of the public eye, meanwhile, Republicans in private admitted to their Democratic colleagues that they had killed a good deal.
FIVE
With the border bill dead, the Senate then revived a standalone foreign aid bill for Ukraine and Israel, passing it on a bipartisan basis, 70-29. This brought the issue full circle, back to where it had been in October.
“We’d have been smarter to do it four to five months ago. But we Republicans insisted on a border bill to be part of the deal. We could have saved a lot of time if President Trump had just told Fox and others he didn’t want the bill,” said Sen. Mitt Romney.
However, Republicans in the House responded by saying that they also opposed this bill. Why? Because it didn’t include border security! A bill for Ukraine aid, said Speaker Johnson, “must recognize that national security begins at our own border.”
It’s almost like he wasn’t aware that his own caucus had just killed a bill that included the very border security policies he was now insisting were needed.
SIX
After dealing a death blow to hopes of passing immigration reform, Republicans changed course yet again and suggested that President Biden could, in fact, take action on the border without any involvement from Congress.
There are many legal issues with this, as past presidents were stymied by the courts after trying to act unilaterally on the border (and many actions aren’t even possible without Congressional funding), but Speaker Johnson nonetheless urged Biden to take executive action. So did other Republicans. Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte, for instance, said the president was trying to “blame Congress for his inability to do his job.”
Which brought us to this: President Biden is now considering a series of executive actions aimed at dealing with the border crisis.
Exactly what Republicans are begging Biden to do, right?
Speaker Mike Johnson is blasting the Biden administration’s consideration of executive action to limit migrant crossings at the border as “election year gimmicks.”
Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up.
SEVEN
Meanwhile, the border crisis rolls on. Ukraine is now losing ground to Russian forces, in part because of a lack of ammunition. And Republicans in the House went home for a two-week break.
And who is to blame for all this? Well, a recent poll shows that public blame is distributed fairly equally among Democrats and Republicans in Congress and the Biden administration, who are all held responsible by about 50% of Americans.
You might ask whether it’s a bit odd that the party which killed a bipartisan border agreement is seen as no more at fault for its collapse than the party that voted for it. And yeah, it is odd. But then, politics is odd, especially in these days of negative partisanship. Stranger still, however, is that the person considered least culpable is Donald Trump, who is only blamed by 39% of respondents.
Yup, the person most responsible for killing the bipartisan deal is the person who is getting the least blame. And this is after Trump bragged about knifing the bill and literally asked people to blame him.
Although, as the New Republic astutely notes:
All this illustrates exactly why Trump insisted his party kill it. Trump is surely aware that in a general sense, the public blames the man sitting in the Oval Office when things go badly … Biden gets blame for what’s happening at the border and also for the failure of Congress to improve the situation after Trump commanded Republicans not to.
Sigh. If you have any good explanations for how American politics has gotten to this point of absurdity, let me know.