On Sunday night, a bipartisan group of senators unveiled a long-awaited $118 billion bill that would pair several strict immigration-enforcement measures with huge amounts of aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. The bill, supported by President Biden and leading Senate Democrats, would give Customs and Border Protection emergency funding almost equal to its annual budget, raise the standard for asylum claims, and allow the U.S. government to shut down the border entirely if too many migrants cross, among other restrictive measures. It offers no path to citizenship for the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants already in the country. It’s the kind of hard-line legislation that top Democrats, who are moving to the right on the issue as the border crisis threatens Biden’s presidency, would never even have considered voting for a few years ago.
Naturally, most Republicans hate it.
Almost immediately upon the bill’s release, House Republicans — who would have to approve the bill if it passes the Senate — started lining up to denounce it in ever starker terms. Speaker Mike Johnson, who for weeks has been warning that the bill would go nowhere in his chamber, confirmed as much.
Other House bigwigs, like New York’s Elise Stefanik, were unsparing in their criticism. By Monday afternoon, the top four House Republicans had issued a joint statement making clear that, in their words, “any consideration of this Senate bill in its current form is a waste of time. It is DEAD on arrival in the House. We encourage the U.S. Senate to reject it.”
Back in the Senate, hard-right Republicans were equally unenthusiastic:
Even some Establishment-friendly Republican senators like John Cornyn of Texas were negative about the bill’s prospects, making it far from clear that Republican lawmakers who might have been on the fence will vote “yes” to advance a piece of doomed legislation. With some left-wing Democratic senators expressing opposition too, the bill’s prospects in the upper chamber — much less the lower — look cloudy.
Senator James Lankford, the bill’s Republican sponsor, said he was “surprised” that so many of his colleagues expressed strong opposition to it so quickly, seemingly without even reading its text. But he shouldn’t have been surprised. While Republicans against the bill couched their opposition on the merits, claiming that its enforcement measures weren’t harsh enough or that Biden could be using executive action to solve the crisis, or urging Congress to pass the House GOP’s version — a nonstarter among Democrats — it’s clear that the bulk of the opposition is about politics, not policy.
As New York’s Jonathan Chait recently observed, most Republicans don’t actually want to solve the immigration crisis, preferring to use it as a political cudgel with which to bash Democrats. The idea of making Biden look strong on the border was already anathema to much of the party, and Republicans’ waning enthusiasm for supporting Ukraine didn’t help. Once Donald Trump came out against such an approach, any chance of compromise was pretty much gone. Trump again railed against the bill on Monday:
With the leader of their party, currently at the top of presidential polls, spouting this kind of rhetoric, why would Republicans fearful of his wrath get onboard? At least one representative was brave enough to be honest about what’s going on:
Good luck, Ukraine!
