The current Congress has been dreadful for a great many reasons, but arguably the lowest of the low points was the fight over a bipartisan agreement on border policies. Months later, it’s something Democrats are eager to discuss anew.
In case anyone needs a refresher, it was last fall when congressional Republicans said they were so desperate to deal with U.S./Mexico border policies that they took a radical step: GOP officials said that unless Democrats agreed to a series of conservative reforms, Republicans were prepared to cut off military aid to Ukraine and let Russia take part of Eastern Europe by force.
Democrats, left with little choice, agreed to pay the GOP’s ransom and endorsed a conservative, bipartisan compromise. At that point, Republicans killed the compromise plan they’d demanded — largely because Donald Trump told them to.
Making matters worse, the calculus was electoral, not substantive: The former president didn’t want Congress to hand President Joe Biden an election-year victory on one of the party’s top priorities. Republicans followed Trump’s lead and concluded that they’d rather have a campaign issue than a solution.
As NBC News reported, some leading Democrats believe it’s time to refresh voters’ memories about what happened and why.
Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., on Wednesday went after former President Donald Trump over his role in sinking a bipartisan Senate bill as the former president seeks to cast Vice President Kamala Harris as a “border czar” who failed to secure the border amid record increases of migrant crossings.
“This was not meeting the Republicans on the 50-yard line, this was meeting them on the 10-yard line,” the Arizona Democrat said during an appearance on MSNBC.
“On their side of the field, we realized, we’ve got to get operational control over the border. I realized this, Kamala Harris realizes this, and this legislation was going to do that,” he added. “And our goal here was to get this legislation passed and then start working on comprehensive immigration reform. But this was stopped dead in its tracks by Donald Trump because he wanted to have this as an election issue. Like a lot of other Republicans, they don’t actually want to solve this problem.”
To be sure, it’s not a secret that Kelly is being considered for his party’s vice presidential nomination, and his comments Wednesday morning served as a timely reminder about his focus on a key issue in the national campaign.
But whether Kelly makes Harris’ 2024 ticket or not, the point he emphasized this morning deserves to be at the center of the public conversation: Every time Trump and Republicans refer to conditions at the border, they should be reminded of the fact that they, at the former president’s behest, rejected a conservative border reform package — twice — that they co-authored and requested. What’s more, it’s not just Democrats who’ve accused the GOP of killing the bill at Trump’s insistence. The Harris campaign just released a new video via social media highlighting a variety of instances in which Republicans have conceded that the Democratic claim is true. Here is a compilation of Republicans pointing out that the border is not solved because Donald Trump killed the border deal pic.twitter.com/aYJ0mNH0aS The video didn’t include Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, but the Kentucky Republican said largely the same thing in April. Kelly helped put all of this in the spotlight Wednesday morning, and no one should be surprised when other Democrats do the same thing every time Trump brings up the border between now and Election Day 2024.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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