Republican Sen. James Lankford, who spent months negotiating the border provisions the GOP demanded, said he may vote against his own bill this week.
Senate Republicans on Monday signaled their plan to filibuster bipartisan legislation that paired tougher border policy with more U.S. aid to Ukraine, a stunning reversal less than 24 hours after the legislation had been unveiled.
With ex-president Donald Trump urging them to kill it, and many on the right up in arms about the proposal, top Senate Republicans emerged from a heated closed-door meeting and said they needed more time to review the agreement, suggesting that a scheduled Wednesday vote to advance the bill is all but doomed to fail.
Because they know how the media narrative will go now. Dems offer a compromise bill that the GOP says they’ll go with. The GOP then doesn’t go with it. The GOP now takes all the blame in the media.
This is doubly important because the border issue is the only one where they have any actual policy that less informed moderate voters might agree with. If it looks like the Dems were arguing in good faith and the GOP was not, then they’ll vote accordingly. Not all of them, but it doesn’t have to be all of them.
The election this year is teetering between a GOP technical victory (losing popular vote for the White House while winning the electoral college) and complete GOP electoral collapse up and down the whole ballot. Things like this make the second option more likely.