Senate Adjourns Until Noon Thursday Without Vote on Aid for Ukraine and Israel
Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, sent everyone home for the night, after Republicans rejected a version of the aid deal that paired it with stringent border security measures they had wanted.
Reporting from the Capitol
The Senate bogged down on Wednesday over a bill to send tens of billions of dollars to Ukraine and Israel after Senate Republicans blocked a compromise that would have paired the aid with stringent border security measures, adjourning without moving forward on the emergency national security spending package.
Democrats, pressing to salvage the aid from becoming a casualty of former President Donald J. Trump’s political campaign, promised a Thursday vote to advance a stand-alone foreign aid bill stripped of the immigration measures. But after a day of stalemate on Capitol Hill, Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, announced that senators needed more time to agree on how to move forward on that alternative, which Democrats and Republicans alike said they hoped would be successful.
Mr. Schumer had hoped for a quick vote on Wednesday on what he called his “Plan B” for reviving the aid package after the border deal failed. But by Wednesday evening, action had stalled, as Senate Republicans slow-walked business on the floor while they regrouped. They held open a procedural vote for hours as they sought assurances from Democrats that if they voted to allow the stripped-down aid bill to move forward, they would be allowed to propose changes.
Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, told reporters that there were ongoing discussions about how the money to Ukraine and Israel would be distributed.
Other Republicans appeared to be stuck in an endless loop, continuing to demand border changes — only hours after voting to tank the aid package that contained them. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, was demanding the chance to add back border provisions. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina told Fox News he would oppose the stand-alone foreign aid bill because “we should first secure our southern border.”
After 7 p.m., Mr. Schumer said the Senate was recessing to “give our Republican colleagues the night to figure themselves out.”
Despite the delay, there were glimmers of hope that the package of aid for Ukraine and Israel would eventually move forward. A bipartisan vote to advance the aid package would represent a remarkable turnaround after months of stalemate and likely put the measure on track for passage in the Senate within days.
The measure would send $60.1 billion to Ukraine for its war against Russian aggression, $14.1 billion in security assistance for Israel and $10 billion in humanitarian aid for civilians of global crises, including Palestinians and Ukrainians.
The effort to get the legislation back on track came after Republicans blocked a bill that paired the foreign aid with stringent border security measures they had demanded. That plan, hashed out over four months of painstaking bipartisan negotiations, hemorrhaged Republican support after Mr. Trump vocally opposed it. It failed on a 50-to-49 vote, falling short of the 60 votes it would have needed to advance, as all but four Republicans voted to reject it.
Even if Democrats succeed in resurrecting the aid bill in the Senate, it still faces stiff headwinds in the Republican-led House, where right-wing lawmakers are opposed to sending additional assistance to Ukraine. Some have even threatened to oust Speaker Mike Johnson if he brings any bill to the floor that includes it.
Members of both parties who have championed the package have warned that the fate of Eastern Europe hangs in the balance, alongside America’s reputation on the world stage, if Congress fails to move ahead.
Mr. Schumer made it clear early Wednesday morning that he planned to move quickly to advance a “Plan B” that he had put in motion earlier in the week when it became clear the border-Ukraine deal would not have the necessary 60 votes to move forward.
“Republicans have said they can’t pass Ukraine without border. Now they say they can’t pass Ukraine with border. Today, I’m giving them a choice,” Mr. Schumer said on the Senate floor on Wednesday before the back-to-back votes. He added, “I urge Republicans to take yes for an answer.”
Mr. Schumer’s maneuver meant that Republicans had to decide whether they wanted to vote twice in one day to block the measure, a grim prospect for a party that on Tuesday suffered a series of humiliating setbacks that showed its inability to govern.
The odd dynamic meant that the border, once an issue that united Republicans, ultimately helped to pave the way for more of them to support funding Ukraine. On Wednesday afternoon, Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, and Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi, both said they would vote for the stand-alone bill after opposing the border-Ukraine package.
The negotiators on the border deal, who spent the past four months putting together what they pitched as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to make conservative policy changes on immigration, vented their frustration on the Senate floor ahead of its demise.
Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma, the lead Republican negotiator, bemoaned how politics had surpassed policy after Mr. Trump inserted himself into the debate, making it clear he did not want lawmakers to take any action on the border as he ran a campaign that once again made immigration one of its central planks.
Holding up the pen he was given when he was sworn in as a senator, Mr. Lankford said: “There’s no reason for me to have this pen if we’re just going to do press conferences. I can do press conferences from anywhere. But we can only make law from this room.”
As he outlined the details of his bill, Mr. Lankford conceded that it had become impossible to counter the misinformation about it that spread online and was amplified by right-wing supporters of Mr. Trump.
He said that one prominent media personality on the right told him directly, “‘if you try to move a bill that solves the border crisis during this presidential year, I will do whatever I can to destroy you.’” Mr. Lankford added, “They have been faithful to their promise and done everything they can to destroy me in the past several weeks.”
Senator Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona Democrat turned independent who has made it her signature in Congress to work across the aisle with Republicans, also criticized them on the Senate floor. She argued that the G.O.P. had made it clear it was interested in little more than political theater.
“After all those campaign photo ops in the desert, after all of those trips to the border, this crisis isn’t actually much of a crisis after all,” said Ms. Sinema, who served as a lead negotiator on the bipartisan bill. She warned any Republican who wanted to use the southern border as a backdrop for future political events: “Don’t come to Arizona. Take your political theater to Texas. Do not bring it to my state.”
Mr. Lankford was ultimately joined by only three other Republicans in voting to allow the bill to advance. The others were Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine and Mitt Romney of Utah. Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and minority leader, voted against a bill that he had championed every step of the way until it became politically untenable.
For Mr. McConnell, who has made it his singular priority this Congress to continue funding the war effort in Ukraine, the immigration deal was ultimately beside the point. He was expected to vote in favor of the stand-alone foreign aid bill.
On Wednesday morning, Mr. Johnson would not say whether the House would take up the stand-alone national security bill, if and when it passed the Senate. “We’ll see what the Senate does; we’re allowing the process to play out,” Mr. Johnson told reporters.
That was a strikingly different tone from his stance on the border and Ukraine package, which he had repeatedly called “dead on arrival” in the House even before he had seen its text. On Tuesday night, Republicans failed to push through a $17.6 billion bill to send military assistance only to Israel, a failure that Mr. Johnson tried to pin on Democrats.
Mr. Johnson, however, is facing immense pressure on his right to reject the national security package. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, has threatened to oust him from the speakership if he brings any bill to the floor that includes funding for Ukraine.
Karoun Demirjian and Carl Hulse contributed reporting.
After several hours, the Senate finally ended the first procedural vote they needed to clear to keep moving toward taking up a foreign aid supplemental, by a vote of 58 to 41.
But the next steps are on hold. Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, sent everybody home until noon Thursday, “to give our Republican colleagues the night to figure themselves out.”
Republicans don’t want to take up the foreign aid-only, border-less bill, unless they are guaranteed to be able to hold votes on border amendments — and possibly other national security-related amendments, too. They have yet to figure out, however, exactly what amendments they want.
Among the ideas for border-related amendments that are being kicked around are a measure to add the Lankford-Sinema-Murphy compromise back into the bill, a measure that would reflect the text of the border enforcement bill the House G.O.P. passed last spring, and a measure to end or modify the Flores agreement, which sets limits on how long migrant children can be held in detention.
But G.O.P. senators will likely push for votes on non-border amendments, too, which could make for a very long — and potentially very messy — road ahead, as leaders try to shore up the support they’ll need to start debating the foreign aid package. The Senate is set to reconvene at noon Thursday, but it’s not yet clear when the next vote may be.
And of course, while Republicans are largely the ones holding up the bill, they aren’t the only ones who want to try to amend this foreign aid package. Almost 20 Senate Democrats have signed on to an amendment that would require recipients of security aid to use weapons in accordance with international law and not stymie efforts to send humanitarian aid to civilians — a measure inspired by, if not explicitly worded to reflect, concerns among Democrats regarding Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza.
There is an old expression on Capitol Hill: You can never be late for the Senate.
Things often plod along so slowly that is almost impossible to miss the end result. That was certainly the case on Wednesday, as senators struggled to regroup after Republicans blocked legislation combining assistance to U.S. allies with tough new border provisions.
Leaders of both parties were ready to rally behind a new proposal that eliminated the border plan but still would send tens of billions of dollars to Ukraine, Israel and Pacific allies.
But before moving forward, Republican senators wanted assurances that they would be allowed to propose changes to that legislation — always an arduous process to work out. And in a truly only-in-Congress move, some senators were insisting on the right to offer border security amendments — even though they had just voted to block the border security bill.
“I’m not giving up on the border,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, despite his vote to block the earlier measure.
The result was that as the sun set on Wednesday, the Senate was in a state of suspended animation, with a procedural vote held open for hours. Members of both parties huddled in offices and communicated by text to try to reach deals on what amendments would be offered if the Senate moved ahead on the stripped-down aid measure. The “world’s greatest deliberative body” can be very deliberate, painfully so.
It is another truism of the Senate that negotiations often have to fall apart completely before senators panic and come up with a plan to move forward. The first element of that formula had been achieved my midafternoon on Wednesday with the collapse of the border bill. The question was whether the prospect that the Senate could fail completely in delivering military aid to U.S. allies was enough to motivate a sufficient number of senators to come together on a new approach. And if so, when?
Then there is another Senate saying made famous by John McCain, the Arizona Republican who was often engaged in backroom Senate negotiating: When it comes to deal-making, it is always darkest before it turns completely black. Sometimes, things fall apart and are never put back together.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTRepublicans appear to be stuck in an endless loop. Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, said on Fox News today that he was opposed to the stand-alone foreign aid bill because “we should first secure our southern border, second, provide resources to Israel, third, take a look at Indo-Pacific, and, fourth, make sure that we have accountability woven into any resources that we give to Ukraine. Without doing those four things in succession, it’s going to be hard for Republicans to support it.” Scott also voted against the Ukraine-border deal, parroting Trump’s talking points about how it didn’t go far enough to fix the crisis at the border.
Reporting from Washington
As House Democrats hit the road Wednesday for a strategy retreat in Leesburg, Va., one strategy was already at the front of many members’ minds: How to make sure Republicans in competitive districts pay a political price for the blockade of a deal to fix problems at the southern border.
Leading Republicans, most notably former President Donald J. Trump, encouraged members of their party to kill bipartisan legislation that would institute some long-sought conservative immigration policies, including providing new powers to quickly shut down migration into the country when the border becomes overwhelmed.
With polls showing that Mr. Trump is seen as tougher on immigration policies than President Biden, these Republicans argued it was better to leave the border problem an unsolved issue headed into the November 2024 election.
But in doing so, Democratic strategists now say, Republicans exposed themselves to a new line of attack, one that could be politically potent against House members who represent swing districts.
“Republicans have been ordered by Donald Trump not to solve the challenges at the border, but to continue to play political games, because they want to use the border as an electoral issue in November,” said Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the top Democrat in the House. “And that’s going to backfire. The Republicans thought they set a border trap for Democrats, and they fell into it themselves.”
Democrats running for competitive seats were already testing out new lines of attack.
“The decision by House Republicans to reject the bipartisan border security bill developed in the Senate, which even the conservative U.S. Border Patrol union supports, is shameful,” former Representative Mondaire Jones, a Democrat who is challenging Republican Representative Mike Lawler for a competitive seat in New York, wrote on social media. “Mike Lawler and his GOP colleagues would rather follow orders from Donald Trump than fix a problem.”
Similar barbs came from Laura Gillen, a New York Democrat who is hoping to unseat Representative Anthony D’Esposito, and Will Rollins, who is taking on Representative Ken Calvert in California.
“Ken Calvert has been in Congress for 32 years. He’s just another career politician who plays politics with every issue,” Mr. Rollins wrote on social media. “He wants to campaign and fund-raise off of the border by making sure it stays broken.”
Since the deal fell through about 90 minutes ago, Republicans have been slow-walking two procedural votes as they regroup to figure out how to move forward. Some, like Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, said they wanted more clarification about how amendments would be attached to the bill. Graham wants a guarantee that he can offer amendments on border security.
And yes, Graham voted against the deal that included border security.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTReporting from Capitol Hill
As the Senate attempted to salvage foreign aid for Ukraine and Israel on Tuesday, House Republicans were still focused on impeaching the homeland security secretary, Alejandro N. Mayorkas, vowing to recover from their embarrassing defeat when more of their members are in Washington to fill out their tiny majority.
Their ability to do so may depend on when Representative Steve Scalise, Republican of Louisiana and the majority leader, is medically able to return to the Capitol for a vote. He is in treatment for blood cancer.
House Republicans on Tuesday fell one vote short of the support they needed to impeach Mr. Mayorkas, after three Republicans broke with the party and opposed the effort to charge him with refusing to uphold the law and breaching the public trust. The three dissenters were Representatives Ken Buck of Colorado, Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin and Tom McClintock of California.
In a chaotic scene on the House floor, Republicans, who at first appeared to have clinched a victory, watched it slip away when Representative Al Green, a Texas Democrat recovering from abdominal surgery, showed up in hospital garb to cast a decisive vote against the resolution.
Now Republicans must orchestrate a similar emergency maneuver to bring back Mr. Scalise, who is undergoing treatment for multiple myeloma. If Republicans had all 219 of their members present for the vote and there were no additional defections, they would be able to impeach Mr. Mayorkas.
But the episode raised questions about Speaker Mike Johnson’s hold on his slim majority, and his team’s ability to count votes and take the sometimes shifting temperature of the fractious Republican conference. If even one Republican is missing for the next impeachment vote, they risk losing or ending in a tie — which also counts as a loss.
“Last night was a setback,” Mr. Johnson told reporters on Wednesday morning. “We will pass those articles of impeachment; we’ll do it on the next round.”
It is unclear, however, when the majority leader will be able to make the trip. A spokeswoman for Mr. Scalise did not immediately respond to a query about when he might be ready to travel, and so far, G.O.P. leaders haven’t committed to a schedule.
They may also be working against the clock. On Tuesday, voters in New York’s third congressional district will vote in a special election to fill the seat vacated when former Representative George Santos, a Republican, was expelled from office.
If the Democrat, former Representative Tom Suozzi, wins, Republicans will no longer have enough votes to impeach Mr. Mayorkas regardless of whether or not Mr. Scalise shows up — unless they are able to persuade any of the three defectors to change their minds.
The Senate is now taking one of two procedural votes that it needs to get through before it takes up Chuck Schumer’s Plan B — a foreign aid package without the border security measures that Republicans negotiated and then voted against.
Four Republicans voted to advance the foreign aid measure that included border security provisions: Senators James Lankford of Oklahoma, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine and Mitt Romney of Utah. Four Democrats — Senators Alex Padilla of California, Bob Menendez of New Jersey, Elizabeth Warren of Masachusetts and Ed Markey of Massachusetts — voted against doing so, as did Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe final vote is 49 to 50. The bill does not advance.
Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, changes his vote to no, which is a strategic procedural move to make sure he can raise the measure again, not a sign that he has suddenly changed his mind about the substance of the bill.
Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, has been signaling for the last two weeks that he might end up voting against the bill he had previously supported, ever since acknowledging to his members in late January that former president Trump’s opposition to a border deal had put the G.O.P. “in a quandary.”
It’s worth noting that Plan B — a foreign aid supplemental bill that doesn’t include the negotiated border security measures — is more in line with what McConnell initially wanted. Way back in September, he wanted to put Ukraine aid into a bill to fund the federal government, but the wave of Republicans demanding border measures as a tradeoff was too overwhelming.
About a dozen senators still have to cast their votes, but the supplemental Ukraine aid bill that includes border security measures will not pass; there are too many votes against it. On to Plan B (whenever they officially finish voting).
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTSenator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, votes against advancing the bill. He is the 41st “no,” so there will not be enough votes to keep this bill alive.
McConnell votes against a bill that he championed from the beginning, until the moment it became politically untenable.
We still haven’t heard from the top two Senate Republicans, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and John Thune of South Dakota. They helped this deal along the way — but to back it, they would have to break with the overwhelming bulk of the G.O.P. conference, and with former President Donald Trump, who has been campaigning against it.
Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, voted to advance the measure. As the top Republican on Senate appropriations, she played a role in bringing this supplemental deal together. So far we have three Republicans voting in favor of the bill — and two of them had a direct hand in creating it.
Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, also just voted to advance the bill. But it doesn’t appear that other Republicans who formerly promoted the measure are going to follow suit: Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina and one of the biggest G.O.P. boosters of the border security negotiations until earlier this week, just voted no.
Senator Alex Padilla, Democrat of California, is a no. He was one of the first Democrats to say he was opposed to the border deal after it came out, arguing it would make the border more chaotic and did not provide relief for the migrants who needed it.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTThis vote is going really slowly, and so far, with the exception of Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma, the lead Republican negotiator on border security, none of the Republicans who were backing the border provisions up until a few days ago have cast a vote. (Lankford voted to advance the bill.)
Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, expects to pick up some of the Democrats who are voting against the border-Ukraine package on the second vote, when they will vote on a version of the bill that has all of the border security measures stripped away.
Republican leaders are also predicting that some of their members who vote no on the border bill will vote yes on the supplemental for Ukraine aid. It may seem counterintuitive, given how forcefully the G.O.P. insisted that border measures had to accompany Ukraine funding for the last four months, but that’s where we seem to be.
Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, both Democrats of Massachusetts, just voted against advancing the bill. They have been among the liberal senators who have objected to the border security provisions as too restrictive.
The vote is proceeding slowly, but there have already been some early aisle-crossers. Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma, the lead Republican negotiator on the border security bill, voted in favor of advancing it, as he announced that he would in the last hour. Senator Bob Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, just voted against it.
Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, also just voted in favor of advancing the bill. That’s two Republicans so far.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe vote to advance the supplemental bill that includes the border security deal is starting.
Even as a Democrat, Senator Kyrsten Sinema saw herself more aligned with Republicans on a variety of issues, so her speech reflects serious frustration at G.O.P. colleagues who ultimately favored politics over policy on an issue important to her state of Arizona.
“We produced a bill many thought impossible,” Senator Kyrsten Sinema, independent of Arizona, says of negotiators’ efforts, in a floor speech taking aim at Republicans for reneging on the border deal they asked for. “Turns out they want all talk and no action.”
Sinema also criticizes House Republicans for demanding the Senate deal mirror a border enforcement bill passed with only G.O.P. support last spring, arguing it does not have many of the improvements that senators put into the bipartisan deal. She accused the GOP of doing more photo ops on the border than legislating to fix it. “Partisanship won,” she says. “Shameful.”
Senator Lankford said he would vote today to advance the supplemental bill that includes the border security provisions he negotiated, even if his Republican colleagues don’t. It wasn’t clear for the last few days whether he would.
On Tuesday, Lankford said he would vote against advancing the bill today if his fellow Republicans truly had concerns with the measure and wanted more time to examine and amend it. Now, it’s clear that’s not why they wanted to block the bill, and Lankford will stand by his bill as his own party kills it.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTSenator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington and the chair of the appropriations committee, is trying to give Republicans a dose of the stakes if they vote no: “This is not a game, there is a war happening, right now, in Ukraine, where our allies are being gunned down and Putin is rolling his tanks into their homeland,” she said.
Reporting from Capitol Hill
News Analysis
Congressional Republicans thought they had set a clever trap for Democrats that would accomplish complementary political and policy goals.
Their idea was to tie approval of military assistance to Ukraine to tough border security demands that Democrats would never accept, allowing Republicans to block the money for Kyiv that many of them oppose while simultaneously enabling them to pound Democrats for refusing to halt a surge of migrants at the border. It was to be a win-win headed into November’s elections.
But Democrats tripped them up by offering substantial — almost unheard-of — concessions on immigration policy without insisting on much in return. Now it is Republicans rapidly abandoning a compromise that gave them much of what they wanted, leaving aid to Ukraine in deep jeopardy, border policy in turmoil and Congress again flailing as multiple crises at home and abroad go without attention because of a legislative stalemate.
The turn of events led to a remarkable Capitol Hill spectacle this week as a parade of Senate Republicans almost instantly repudiated a major piece of legislation they had spent months demanding as part of any agreement to provide more help to a beleaguered Ukraine. Even Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader and foremost Republican advocate of helping Ukraine, and Senator James Lankford, the Oklahoma Republican who invested months in cutting the border deal, suggested they would vote to block it on the floor in a test vote set for Wednesday.
It left Senate Republicans, who had mainly avoided the chaos that has consumed House Republicans for the past two years, looking more like their counterparts across the rotunda, rocked by division, finger-pointing and even calls from the far right for new leadership.
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Reporting from Washington
News Analysis
When President Biden agreed to bipartisan talks on border legislation last fall, Democratic strategists hoped a deal might take the issue off the table for his re-election campaign.
But with the collapse of the resulting bipartisan immigration agreement on Wednesday at the hands of former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Biden got something else instead: someone to blame.
The crisis at the southwestern border has been one of the most vexing challenges of Mr. Biden’s presidency, one that has defied his policy prescriptions and drained his public support. With record numbers of migrants illegally crossing into the country, the president has come under pressure from Democrats as well as Republicans to take more action.
For three years, Mr. Biden struggled to offer voters a compelling answer to the question of why the border has turned into such a crisis on his watch. He has avoided public discussion of the issue as much as possible, preferring to focus his messaging on other priorities. But with Mr. Trump’s intervention persuading congressional Republicans to abandon the border deal that they themselves had demanded, Mr. Biden finally has an opportunity to shift from defense to offense.
“The American people are going to know why it failed,” he declared in a televised speech at the White House. “I’ll be taking this issue to the country, and the voters are going to know that it’s not just a moment — just at the moment we were going to secure the border and fund these other programs, Trump and the MAGA Republicans said no because they’re afraid of Donald Trump.”
“Every day between now and November,” he added, “the American people are going to know that the only reason the border is not secure is Donald Trump and his MAGA Republican friends.”
Mr. Trump and his allies ridiculed the idea that Mr. Biden could deflect blame after three years of failing to secure the border.
“Joe Biden blamed President Trump for the border crisis that Biden himself created,” said Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the former president. “This is a brazen, pathetic lie and the American people know the truth — President Trump’s policies created the most secure border in American history, and it was Joe Biden who reversed them.”
Taking their cue from the former president, Senate Republicans sank the deal in a floor vote on Wednesday, deeming it inadequate. But that left a muddled result for the week, coming just a day after House Republicans fell a vote short in trying to impeach Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, for failing in their view to secure the border, an embarrassing setback for the G.O.P.
The border has been one of Mr. Biden’s least favorite issues. Illegal crossings have shot up since he took office, from 73,944 reported in December 2020 just before he was inaugurated to 302,034 last December, and governors and mayors as far away as New York and Illinois have sounded alarms about the resulting burdens on their communities.
Forty-five percent of Americans now view the situation at the border as “a crisis,” up 8 percentage points from last spring, and another 30 percent consider it “very serious,” according to a poll by CBS News and YouGov last month. A survey released Wednesday by PBS NewsHour, NPR and Marist found that only 29 percent of Americans approve of Mr. Biden’s leadership on the issue, as more Democrats and independents express concern.
As a matter of pure politics, Mr. Biden was probably never going to outperform his challenger among voters who care strongly about illegal immigration, Mr. Trump’s signature issue since the days he led crowds chanting “build the wall” in 2016.
But in terms of re-election strategy, Democratic operatives believed that Mr. Biden needed to keep immigration from cutting into his support among swing voters disturbed by the surge of undocumented migrants without alienating progressives who have been disappointed that he has not done more to reverse Trump-era policies.
It was a measure of how much the politics of the issue have shifted in recent years that Mr. Biden embraced the bipartisan deal negotiated by Senators James Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma; Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut; and Kyrsten Sinema, the Democrat-turned-independent of Arizona.
The legislation would have tightened the rules for asylum seekers, expanded detention facilities, hired more border agents, sped up the process to send back migrants who do not qualify and even shut down the border temporarily during peak times. But it incorporated none of the signature provisions long demanded by Democrats in comprehensive immigration legislation, such as a pathway to citizenship for those already here or protections for younger immigrants brought into the country as children.
Mr. Trump made clear that he saw the deal not as a solution but a threat to his bid to reclaim his office. “This Bill is a great gift to the Democrats, and a Death Wish for The Republican Party,” he wrote on social media this week. “It takes the HORRIBLE JOB the Democrats have done on Immigration and the Border, absolves them, and puts it all squarely on the shoulders of Republicans. Don’t be STUPID!!!”
Mr. Lankford, among the most conservative members of the Senate, attributed opposition to the deal from the right to presidential politics. Speaking on the Senate floor, he said a popular commentator he did not identify told him, “If you try to move a bill that solves the border crisis during this presidential year, I will do whatever I can to destroy you because I do not want you to solve this during the presidential election.”
The White House has wasted little time reframing the issue as an obstructionist Mr. Trump intimidating Republicans into turning on a deal that has the support of conservative institutions, including the Border Patrol union that has previously endorsed Mr. Trump. “Will the House G.O.P. vote with the Border Patrol to secure the border, or with Donald Trump for more fentanyl?” the White House asked in a memo sent to reporters.
The change was welcome for Democrats looking ahead to a close election. “Until very recently, the border was President Biden’s problem almost exclusively,” said Geoffrey Garin, a Democratic pollster. “But now by blocking strong, bipartisan border legislation Republicans have made it their problem as well.”
He added, “The fact that President Biden can now say that he was prepared to sign and enforce the strongest border law in history, but Republicans blocked it at Trump’s behest puts Biden in a much better position than he was before in the immigration debate.”
Margie Omero, another Democratic strategist, said voters would understand which side actually wanted to get something done. “Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress are working for solutions,” she said. “The Republican Party routinely puts obstruction and scoring political points over tackling our big challenges.”
Mr. Biden’s critics, though, doubt he can shift blame after so much time. For much of his presidency, they said, the president and his allies have resisted even admitting there was a crisis, only to switch gears and say that there is one and that it is Mr. Trump’s fault.
“It seems to me absurd on its face,” said Mark S. Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies and a leading voice for tougher policies. “Obviously Biden partisans will latch onto that, and obviously Trump partisans will scoff at it. The question is will people in the middle buy it or not. I find it hard to believe that anybody would believe it. After three years?”
Scott Jennings, a Republican strategist, called it “a transparently cynical ploy” that will not work. “He must really think voters are stupid, trying to convince them that after three years of his policies that Republicans are somehow at fault,” Mr. Jennings said. “Nobody believes Joe Biden wants to ‘get tough’ on the border. Please. His administration has argued for three years the border is secure. What changed? Oh. It’s election time.”
Elections, of course, revolve around narratives. For three years, Republicans had a clear story line when it came to the border — Mr. Biden either intentionally or incompetently opened the floodgates. Now the president has a counternarrative to offer — that whatever may have happened before, at least he wanted to fix the problem and Mr. Trump did not. The next nine months will test which one is more persuasive.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTAfter a trio of negotiators put the finishing touches on a border security compromise that took months to forge, what should have been a triumphant moment felt more like an ordeal for the group’s lone Republican.
“I feel like the guy standing in the middle of the field in a thunderstorm, holding up the metal stick,” Senator James Lankford, the Oklahoma Republican who was his party’s lead broker of the deal, told reporters last week.
The plight of Mr. Lankford, a slim, understated Baptist minister with a neatly combed shock of red hair and a baritone voice that regularly delivers deadpan quips, reflects the extraordinary rise and fall of the border and Ukraine deal that is expected to collapse in a test vote in the Senate on Wednesday — and the political forces within the Republican Party that brought it down.
For months, Mr. Lankford, a staunch conservative, labored over the package alongside Senators Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, and Kyrsten Sinema, an Arizona independent, demanding strict immigration policies his party insisted must be a part of any bill to send a fresh infusion of aid to Ukraine. But when Mr. Lankford managed to extract them, he found his fellow Republicans unwilling to embrace the plan, in a vivid illustration of how the political ground for any compromise on immigration has vanished for a party that has decided the issue is too valuable as a political weapon to resolve.
Mr. Lankford, who once said he had drawn the “short straw when it came time to be able to negotiate all this,” has been left to pick up the pieces — a process he dryly likened on Tuesday to having been run over by a bus, and then having it back up over him again.
Just as Mr. Lankford and his fellow negotiators neared a deal, former President Donald J. Trump stepped in, trashing the bill both before and after it was released on Sunday and opening the floodgates of Republican resistance. That left Mr. Lankford fighting to keep the deal alive while being attacked by members of his own party, including in his home state, where the Republican Party tried to censure him late last month for “playing fast and loose with Democrats on our border policy.” (The resolution was later rescinded.)
On Tuesday, even as his colleagues were calling the compromise dead, Mr. Lankford refused to give up.
“The Scripture references say you work as long as there’s daylight, so I’m going to keep working until we know it’s got no chance to be able to move anymore, because I really think the issue needs to be resolved,” he said.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTRepublicans in Congress who have spent months demanding that any aid to Ukraine be paired with a crackdown against migration into the United States got what they asked for when a bipartisan group of senators released a $118.3 billion agreement that would provide both.
On Monday, many of them rejected it anyway.
It was the latest indication that the political ground for any agreement on immigration — particularly in an election year when it is expected to be a central issue of the presidential campaign — has vanished.
With former President Donald J. Trump eager to attack President Biden’s record on the border and right-wing Republicans in Congress falling in line behind him, a compromise was always going to be a long shot. The long-awaited release on Sunday night of the text of the 370-page bill only served to inflame Republican divisions on an issue that once united them.
Even as Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader and a champion of funding for Ukraine, took to the floor to push for action on the bill, many of his fellow Republican leaders were savaging it. Speaker Mike Johnson denounced the measure as “even worse than we expected” and, in a joint statement with his leadership team, repeated what had become his mantra about the deal — that it would be “dead on arrival” in the House.
Even more temperate Republican voices like Senator John Cornyn of Texas, who had encouraged the negotiations, said that after reviewing it, he harbored “serious concerns.” (Mr. Cornyn, who is often mentioned as a potential successor to Mr. McConnell as the Republican leader, notably gave the statement to the hard-right news outlet Breitbart.)
By Monday evening, Mr. McConnell was privately acknowledging that the measure had hemorrhaged support among Republicans, and recommending they move to block it unless Democrats agreed to debate it further and allow them to propose changes.
It pointed to a bleak outlook for the complicated compromise bill that followed a longstanding pattern on Capitol Hill, where major immigration agreements have often come close to enactment only to fall apart just before the finish line after Republicans condemn them as too weak.
“The $64,000 question now is whether or not senators can drown out the outside noise, drown out people like Donald Trump who want chaos and do the right thing for America,” Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, said in a speech on the Senate floor on Monday afternoon. “I urge senators of good will on both sides of the aisle to do the right thing and tune the chaos out.”
Mr. Schumer reminded his colleagues that “we live in an era of divided government, and that means that both sides need to compromise if we want to pass a bill.”
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Reporting from Capitol Hill
Republicans in Congress suffered a humiliating series of setbacks on Tuesday on critical elements of their agenda, turning the Capitol into a den of dysfunction that has left several major issues, including U.S. military aid to Ukraine and Israel, in limbo amid political feuding.
As Republicans in the Senate torpedoed a border deal they had demanded, the bid by their counterparts in the House to impeach Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, collapsed amid Republican defections.
Then came one last bruising blow. Minutes after Republicans fell one vote short of impeaching Mr. Mayorkas — a punishment the party has promised its base ever since winning the majority — the House defeated legislation they put forward to send $17.6 billion in military assistance to Israel. The measure fell to opposition from Democrats who called it a cynical political ploy to undermine efforts to pass a broader foreign military aid bill including Ukraine. They were joined by a clutch of hard-right Republicans, who opposed the measure because the money was not paired with spending cuts.
Taken together, the events that unfolded on Capitol Hill on Tuesday offered a vivid portrait of congressional disarray instigated by Republicans, who are bent on opposing President Biden at every turn but lack a large enough majority or the unity to work their will.
They have sought to kill bipartisan efforts to send more military aid to Ukraine and to forge a compromise to secure the border against an influx of migrants, proposing instead to help Israel only and to push for the removal of Mr. Biden’s top immigration official. The back-to-back defeats on Tuesday showed that while they are adept at thwarting action on critical issues, they are hard-pressed to address any.
The paralysis left the fate of aid to Ukraine and Israel in peril, closing off what had been seen as the best remaining avenue on Capitol Hill for approval of critical military assistance to American allies. A broad measure that includes both is expected to fail in a Senate test vote on Wednesday, raising immediate questions about whether Congress could salvage the emergency aid package — and if so, how.
Kayla Guo and Luke Broadwater contributed reporting.