The Senate appeared ready to move forward on Wednesday with a planned procedural vote on the bipartisan border and national security bill, even as the legislation looked increasingly likely to fail due to entrenched opposition among Republicans.
The $118bn bill would grant the president a new power to shut down the border when daily crossings pass a certain limit while also expediting the asylum review process, which could lead to a quicker deportation for many migrants. The bill would provide $60bn in military assistance for Ukraine, $14bn in security assistance for Israel and $10bn in humanitarian assistance for civilians affected by war in Ukraine, Gaza and the West Bank.
The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, a Democratic senator of New York, had indicated the chamber would hold a vote to begin debate on the bill on Wednesday. The threshold for approving the procedural motion would be 60 votes in the 100-member chamber.
“We feel this is so important for the security of America at the border, for the security of Ukraine and Israel. We’re going to keep at it,” Schumer said Tuesday. “This is not the last Republicans will hear from us. We’re going to keep at it. We will have a vote tomorrow. We will move further forward. Stay tuned.”
The most vocal proponents of the deal, which was brokered by the White House and a bipartisan group of senators after months of negotiations, appeared increasingly resigned to the idea that the bill would not advance. Even if the bill could somehow win enough support to pass the Senate, the House speaker, Republican Mike Johnson of Louisiana, has already declared the legislation would be “dead on arrival” in the House.
In a pointed speech delivered at the White House on Tuesday, Joe Biden blamed the bill’s likely failure on Donald Trump, who has encouraged Republicans to oppose the deal. Writing on his social media platform Truth Social on Monday, Trump dismissed the bill as “nothing more than a highly sophisticated trap for Republicans to assume the blame on what the Radical Left Democrats have done to our Border, just in time for our most important EVER Election”. Echoing Trump’s concern about the impact that the bill’s passage could have on the presidential race, some Republican lawmakers have suggested border security should not be addressed until after the November election.
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“All indications are this bill won’t even move forward to the Senate floor. Why? A simple reason: Donald Trump. Because Donald Trump thinks it’s bad for him politically … He’d rather weaponize this issue than actually solve it,” Biden said Tuesday. “Every day between now and November, the American people are going to know that the only reason the border is not secure is Donald Trump and his Maga [Make America great again] Republican friends.”
Despite their outrage over the record-high number of arrests for illegal crossings at the US-Mexican border, many hard-right Republicans also insisted the bill did not go far enough to merit their support. Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, celebrated its expected demise during a press conference on Tuesday.
“The good news is this bill is dead,” Cruz said. “On policy, why is this bill a terrible bill? Because it does not solve the problem.”
Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, had championed the bill, but he acknowledged on Tuesday that it was unlikely to become law. He instead suggested the Senate refocus its efforts on passing a funding package that would provide financial support to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan but would not address border security.
“We still, in my view, ought to tackle the rest of it because it’s important,” McConnell said. “Not that the border isn’t important, but we can’t get an outcome. So that’s where I think we ought to head.”
The Senate considered such a foreign aid package in December, but the chamber could not pass the bill. Republicans, who insisted that the legislation must address the situation at the border, blocked it from advancing.
