Last fall, 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 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. It was at that point when Republicans, acting at Donald Trump’s behest, killed the compromise plan they demanded.
Complicating matters, 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.
In the months that followed, an underlying security aid package — the legislation that was going to include the border and immigration reforms — slowly advanced on Capitol Hill and ultimately passed this week. But before the work wrapped up, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell reflected on his party’s missed opportunity.
“We all felt that the border was a complete disaster, myself included,” the Kentucky Republican said. “First there was an effort to make law, which requires you to deal with Democrats, and then a number of our members thought it wasn’t good enough. And then our nominee for president didn’t seem to want us to do anything at all.”
As NBC News reported, that was a line the White House was eager to draw attention to.
The White House seized on remarks by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell that former President Donald Trump resisted accepting any bipartisan compromise to toughen border security laws. McConnell, R-Ky., made the comments hours before the Senate passed a sweeping $95 billion foreign aid package to provide assistance to Ukraine and Israel, capping months of internal GOP infighting that culminated in no immigration add-ons.
“This week Senator McConnell explicitly said why the toughest, fairest bipartisan border legislation in modern American history is stalled: ‘our nominee for president did not seem to want us to do anything at all,’” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a memo sent to news organizations this week. “After President Biden worked with Republicans and Democrats in the Senate to assemble a landmark deal that secured the border and cracked down on fentanyl, congressional Republicans have been direct about why many of them sided with drug cartels and human smugglers over the Border Patrol Union and the Chamber of Commerce — because Donald Trump told them to,” Bates added. “This comes after President Biden turned around the soaring violent crime rate he inherited from his predecessor, leaving in its place the largest drop in violent crime in half a century. It also comes as 80% of House Republicans propose defunding the police by cutting the COPS program, in contrast to his plan to hire over 100,000 more officers. “President Biden will not allow extreme Republican officials to endanger American communities. He will keep fighting for the toughest, fairest border security deal in decades.” We probably haven’t heard the last of this. Every time border policy comes up in the coming months, the White House and its allies want voters to hear the same message: Democrats agreed to a conservative, bipartisan compromise, which Trump and his allies killed.
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."
Latest Post
Recommended
