It’s been 45 days since President Joe Biden implored Congress to approve emergency funding to provide aid to Ukraine and Israel, American allies who are at war with Russia and Hamas, respectively. In that month and a half, there’s been almost no action on Capitol Hill, as what would normally be a layup of a bill has been stonewalled thanks to Republican obstinance.
Providing help to the two countries is a top priority for the White House, which warns that money for Ukraine is set to run out shortly. But Senate Democrats rightly decided that an attempted bipartisan effort to shake loose that $100 billion national security package came at much too high a price.
Senate Democrats rightly decided that an attempted bipartisan effort to shake loose that $100 billion national security package came at much too high a price.
The largest hurdle to Biden’s proposed aid package has been the GOP’s insistence on linking that aid passing to other conservative pet projects, including defunding the IRS. House Republicans, in particular, have soured on Ukraine aid overall and have demanded that any new funding for that country come with a draconian immigration bill attached to it. While not endorsing the House bill fully, a group of Senate Republicans has declared that changes to how the U.S. processes asylum-seekers at the southern border is its condition for approving Biden’s aid package. Even Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who is generally in favor of the foreign aid package, said in October that “Democrats will have to accept a really serious U.S.-Mexico border protection bill in order to get our people on board.”
To that end, a bipartisan group of five senators had been trying to craft some kind of compromise. On a Friday early last month, CBS News reported that the group — which includes Democratic Sens. Michael Bennet of Colorado and Chris Murphy of Connecticut, Republicans James Lankford of Oklahoma and Thom Tillis of North Carolina and independent Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — was “working through the weekend to forge a deal.” Punchbowl News reported Monday that those talks came to a sudden halt last week.
But that may not be a bad thing. Because, according to a New York Times report Friday, the group had reportedly agreed that the package “should include a measure making it more difficult to be granted asylum in the United States.” The agreement would have imposed “a stricter definition for migrants to meet when they claim they need refuge because they fear persecution in their home countries.” Biden administration officials are willing to accept that demand, but only for a relatively small number of migrants who are crossing the border, the Times added.
Democrats in the group shouldn’t have even agreed to that, but as Punchbowl reported, they finally walked away from the talks because Republicans continued to push to include harsher elements from House Republicans’ immigration bill. Tillis and Lankford, in particular, were pressing to make former President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy and his expanded family detention program the law of the land. They were also pushing to codify Trump’s “transit ban,” which required asylum-seekers to first apply for refuge in a country on their way to the U.S. border.
That the proposed changes to asylum requirements were even on the table is a major red flag.
I understand why Senate Democrats were initially interested in advancing those talks. In theory, the deal on the table could have killed two birds with one stone. It could have freed up aid that, in Ukraine’s case, has been stalled for months and, theoretically, could have helped inoculate Democrats against GOP political attacks that they’ve not done enough to slow the pace of asylum-seekers who’ve overwhelmed the current system. (The pressure that built up at the border under the Trump administration is the main reason, but I digress.)
But this deal would have been bad on multiple levels. Most significantly, it involved no concessions from Republicans aside from passing an aid package that already has bipartisan support, even if it lacks the votes to clear a GOP filibuster. As Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., who was not at the negotiating table in this current deal, noted in a statement with 10 other Democrats, it’s strategically a bad idea to trade long-term, permanent policy changes for a one-time spending package.
What’s more, the package that Biden put forward included funds for more Border Patrol agents and detention facilities. That Republicans have refused to acknowledge that as a concession from Democrats shows, yet again, how they are constantly moving the goal posts on what they demand from Democrats on “border security.”
The hard-line immigration demand was finally deemed to be a nonstarter for Democrats, even if it dooms the package. Still, they dodged a bullet. That the proposed changes to asylum requirements were even on the table is a major red flag. Passing those propositions into law for such a temporary victory would have correctly been seen as Democrats cravenly covering their bases politically and throwing migrants under the bus. Giving in to Republicans’ unreasonable demands would only have led to more unreasonable demands in the future.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House.