The Senate Democrats are heading toward a rough election. In a chamber split 51-49, they’re defending incumbents in Ohio, Montana, and other conservative constituencies. The Democrats’ campaign arm has been sending panicked texts on behalf of Montana Sen. Jon Tester all week.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has seen the writing on the wall… and he announced a political gambit Monday.
In a letter, Schumer announced his plan to resurrect an old bill for border security, a bill stalled since February.
“We are hopeful this bipartisan proposal will bring serious-minded Republicans back to the table to advance this bipartisan solution for our border,” Schumer wrote in a letter to his colleagues.
“I will be honest: I do not expect all Democrats to support this legislation. Many of our colleagues do not support some of the provisions in this legislation, nor do I expect all Republicans to agree to every provision. But that is often how bipartisan legislation must be shaped when dealing with an issue as complex and politically charged as our nation’s immigration laws.”
The Senate drafted the border bill earlier this year. The chief negotiators — Democrat Chris Murphy of Connecticut, Republican James Lankford of Oklahoma, and independent Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — tried tying border security to Ukraine aid amid some Republicans’ objections about further aid to Ukraine.
By February, former President Donald Trump had criticized the bill, and then the Senate GOP refused to advance it. During the State of the Union, President Joe Biden wagged his finger at congressional Republicans opposed to the bill.
Now, Schumer is introducing the exact same bill and expecting a different result.
“The former President made clear he would rather preserve the issue for his campaign than solve the issue in a bipartisan fashion,” Schumer said in Monday’s letter. “On cue, many of our [Republican] colleagues abruptly reversed course on their prior support, announcing their new-found opposition to the bipartisan proposal.”
After Monday’s letter, Schumer faced wide criticism for his politically motivated decision to retry a failed bill.
Even Lankford — one of the bill’s negotiators — went on Newsmax to slam Schumer.
“No one’s talked to me about trying to be able to solve this because this is not a serious work to be able to resolve it,” Lankford told Newsmax last week. “What we were trying to do in the past, several months ago, was do a serious, bipartisan sit-down conversation, saying where do we have common ground, what can we get fixed. Biden’s not gonna do his job, what can we actually get done to be able to solve the problem… No one’s sitting down to actually do that kind of work at this point.”
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., put it even more bluntly.
“Let’s just be realistic. They are looking at the polls. They’re getting hammered; Biden is getting hammered for the failure at the border,” Tillis has said, according to ABC News. “So Schumer is going to do everything he can to say ‘nothing to see here this failure is not real’ and it is real. And he knows it won’t pass.”
House GOP leaders wrote that the bill “would be dead on arrival” in the lower chamber.
“Leader Schumer is trying to give his vulnerable members cover by bringing a vote on a bill which has already failed once in the Senate because it would actually codify many of the disastrous Biden open border policies that created this crisis in the first place,” they wrote.
Schumer expected a brighter outcome after announcing his attempt to introduce the border bill again. Schumer has certainly seen a different result: a worse one.