Republican Senator Gives Away the Game on Why They Killed Border Deal

Senator Josh Hawley said the quiet part out loud on Friday, explicitly tying the GOP’s border security grandstanding to a coordinated effort to hurt President Joe Biden’s reelection chances.

“Senator, is this deal dead, effectively?” Fox News’s Laura Ingraham asked Hawley Thursday evening.

“I hope so,” Hawley said. “It should be. If it’s not dead yet it should be dead. There is absolutely no reason to agree to policies that would further enable Joe Biden.”

The Senate reached a bipartisan border deal this week, which would include additional funding for border security as well as aid for Ukraine. But the minute Donald Trump criticized the deal, Senate Republicans caved and said they probably won’t pass it.

Hawley’s statement is more proof that Republicans aren’t all that interested in the so-called border crisis. They just want to use it as a political tool in the 2024 election.

Republicans have spent months quietly killing any bipartisan packages related to the border and foreign aid in favor of their own proposition. Also, on Friday the House’s highest member rejected the Senate’s bipartisan deal.

“I wanted to provide a brief update regarding the supplemental and the border, since the Senate appears unable to reach any agreement,” House Speaker Mike Johnson wrote in a letter to his colleagues on Friday. “If rumors about the contents of the draft proposal are true, it would have been dead on arrival in the House anyway.”

“Nine months have now passed since we sent our Secure the Border Act (HR 2) to the Senate,” Johnson wrote, referring to an extreme asylum-limiting immigration bill that died in the Senate. “Since the day I became Speaker, I have assured our Senate colleagues the House would not accept any counterproposal if it would not actually solve the problems that have been created by the administration’s subversive policies.”

The wavering deals come part and parcel with a showdown along the U.S.-Mexico border between Texas and the federal government over the placement of concertina wire by Texas’s local authorities along the Rio Grande.

On Wednesday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott declared the influx of immigrants across the border an “invasion”—a status that Abbott claimed supersedes federal mandates—and issued a statement on the state’s constitutional right to defend itself.

That was just two days after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of President Joe Biden by declaring that Texas went outside its jurisdiction by erecting makeshift concertina wire fences along the Rio Grande section of the U.S.-Mexico border, effectively preventing the U.S. border patrol from doing their job. Texas has continued building new wire barriers since that ruling.

At least 25 Republican governors have issued their support for Abbott, including Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey, and Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon.