Republican accuses McConnell of giving 'Biden and Democrats a win' amid border infighting
Republicans in Congress are currently heavily divided on whether to pass a bill to solve what they call a "crisis" at the border, or to let the "crisis" continue unabated for the remainder of 2024 in hopes that former President Donald Trump can get elected to a second term and take credit for it in 2025.
A bipartisan group of senators — led by Sens. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma), Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Arizona) — recently assembled a framework for a border security bill that would allow an unprecedented shutdown of the border if crossings top 5,000 in one week. President Joe Biden has said he would have already shut down the border if the bill were law, as there were more than 300,000 border encounters in December alone.
That border funding would be combined with a foreign aid package that includes an additional round of appropriations for supporting Ukraine's war against Russia and money to shore up Taiwan's defense against potential Chinese incursion. However, in a recent op-ed for the Hill, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Florida) accused Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) of undermining his party's political goals with the border bill.
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"These politicians, who are hell-bent on this deal, represent a Republican Party that exists only in Washington, where it’s dominated by political and economic insiders," Scott wrote. "McConnell’s plan to give Biden and Democrats a win that they can campaign on and claim they’re working to solve the border crisis is a joke."
Other Republicans have gone on the record effectively admitting that their opposition to new border legislation is more about politics than policy. In an interview with Fox News, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) said "there is absolutely no reason to agree to policies that would further enable Joe Biden." And House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) recently said he spoke to Trump "at length" about the border, in the wake of reports about Trump privately lobbying Republicans to oppose the bill.
"The president, of course — President Trump wants to secure the country," said Johnson, who reiterated that the bill would be "dead" in his chamber if it passed the US Senate. "President Trump is the one that talked about border security before anyone else did. He ran on, as you remember, building the wall. Why? Because he saw this catastrophe coming."
President Joe Biden, in the meantime, has said he has "done all [he] can do" about the border without additional legislation. He told reporters on Monday that he wants Congress to "give me the Border Patrol. Give me the judges. Give me the people that can stop this and make it work."
READ MORE: Here are the details of the new bipartisan border security bill Trump doesn't want passed
