We are nearly a year away from an election that could give Trump the presidency, and Ukraine-obsessive Republicans have already given the Democrats a predicate to impeach him. Slava Ukraini, America be damned.”
This weekend, Senate Democrats (joined by a few Republicans, including most Republican leadership) forced through a “security supplemental” that spends close to $100 billion, most of it on Ukraine. It was the culmination of months of secretive negotiations on border security. Those negotiations produced a border security product unacceptable to most Republicans, so then Republicans voted it down, and then an hour later we were debating a security supplemental with border security stripped out.
The quick pivot, refusal to negotiate another round on border security, and immediate shift to blame Trump confirmed one thing: Republican leadership wasn’t serious about border security. They cared most about Ukraine funding and saw the border negotiations as a distraction. This extinguished any hope of real border security before the negotiation began.
The story our leadership tells is that the “politics of border security” had changed because of Donald Trump. James Lankford dutifully negotiated a bipartisan border product. Conservative Republicans encouraged this negotiation. When the product took shape, Donald Trump demanded conservatives walk. Trump argued that Joe Biden didn’t need a border security package—which was true—so Republicans should ask simply that Joe Biden do his job. This intervention allegedly killed a great piece of border policy.
This is a fairytale that makes conservative senators and Donald Trump look bad, perhaps by design. In truth, the demands conservative senators made at the beginning of the negotiation went like this: Joe Biden can fix this problem, but he refuses, so we must make him do his job. This posture came along specific demands from senators ranging from Ukraine aid supporters like Marco Rubio to Ukraine aid skeptics like me, and those in the middle like Ron Johnson. We argued that we could condition further Ukraine aid on decreased illegal border crossings. In other words, Congress would appropriate money to Ukraine in stages: if Biden refused to drive down border crossings, he wouldn’t get his money for Ukraine.
The deal, as envisioned by conservatives, was apparently never on the table. According to both Democratic colleagues and some Republicans, this is because Republican leadership—specifically Mitch McConnell—refused to push the Democrats on this issue. Other Republicans have argued instead that even if Mitch McConnell empowered Lankford to make this demand, Democrats would have never agreed.
By J.D. Vance
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