A Senate deal that tied U.S.-Mexico border security to Ukraine aid, written in part by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, suffered a swift and political embarrassing collapse Tuesday as Republicans withdrew support.
Some have called for McConnell to step aside from his leadership role over the failure.
Former President Donald Trump, the 2024 Republican presidential front-runner, blasted the bill and said it didn’t go far enough to secure the U.S.-Mexico border, which both Democratic and Republican leaders have recently described as descended into chaos.
Trump called on Republicans to defeat the bill over the weekend. On Tuesday, McConnell acknowledged that the deal was dead.
“It looks to me and to most of our members that we have no real chance here to make a law,” the Kentucky Republican told reporters.
The sudden and total collapse of the long-awaited compromise bill left many Republican leaders calling for McConnell’s resignation, including Sen. Ted Cruz, R-T.X.
“I think it is,” Cruz said, when asked if it’s time for the 82-year-old McConnell to step down.
“Everyone here also supported a leadership challenge to Mitch McConnell in November,” Cruz said. “I think a Republican leader should actually lead this conference and should advance the priorities of Republicans.”
Cruz said the costly 2022 election, where Democrats held off an expected Republican ‘red wave’ should have been a wake up call.
“It was right after a very disappointing election, 2022. The wind was at our back. It should have been a phenomenal Republican election year,” Cruz said. “Republicans should have won the Senate. We should have won a big majority in the House. Instead, we lost a seat in the Senate. And we barely got a majority in the House.”
“I stood up and said, ‘Look, in any ordinary organization, when you are faced with failure, you’re running a business and you lose $50 million, you don’t just say hey, everything’s great. Let’s keep doing it. Now you sit down and say, What are we doing wrong?’ asked.
A longtime ally of McConnell, Sen. Mike Lee, R-U.T., also expressed doubts about his continuing leadership.
“We’ll see how he handles this along the way,” Lee told reporters Tuesday. “This is — to put it mildly — very, very frustrating. Like, it’s important for senators to understand that we all work for our respective states, our respective voters in our various states.”
“He’s not our boss. He has a specialized role, which is to represent us on the floor and our interests,” Lee said.
It was a rapid turn of events that is further evidence of McConnell’s slipping control of his GOP conference, Trump’s growing influence, and Biden’s ability only to look on as a cornerstone of his foreign policy — halting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion into Europe — crumbled in Congress.
Moderate Republicans have run into a wall of opposition from conservatives — led by Trump — who reject the border proposal as insufficient and criticize Ukraine funding as wasteful.
Biden seized on the opportunity and began to blame Trump — his likely Republican opponent in the November presidential election – for the border chaos, a theme that will likely continue through the election.
“For the last 24 hours he’s done nothing, I’m told, but reach out to Republicans in the House and the Senate and threaten them and try to intimidate them to vote against this proposal,” Biden said. “It looks like they’re caving. Frankly, they owe it to the American people to show some spine and do what they know to be right.”
The speed of the bills collapse is almost unprecedented. Just hours of the bill’s release over the weekend, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-L.A., said he would not support it, and even GOP senators who had helped write the legislation came out against the bill on Tuesday.
“The politics of this were a big factor,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-T.X. “When the speaker said, basically, the Senate bill is dead on arrival. And then President Trump weighs in and discourages Republicans from voting for it.”
The Horn editorial team and the Associated Press contributed to this article