Key events
Congress has been a place of legislative trench warfare for much of the past decade-plus, but the quandary lawmakers are in right now over aid to both Ukraine and Israel and border policy is unique for the sheer variety of issues at hand.
It all started in the aftermath of Hamas’s 7 October terrorist attack, when Joe Biden rushed over to Israel, then came back to the White House and made an Oval Office address pleading for Congress to approve assistance to Ukraine and Israel’s militaries, as well as some funds for Taiwan and to bolster border security.
But in Congress, a growing faction of Republicans had turned against further aiding Kyiv’s defense against the Russian invasion. Biden’s request nonetheless presented an opportunity to get the Democrats to bend on an issue more or less completely separate from the military aid request: immigration policy. Rates of migrants entering the United States from Mexico have surged under Biden, which Republicans have pounced on to argue his administration is failing to protect the country.
While not everyone in the GOP was behind the effort, a group of Republican and Democratic senators began negotiating over tightening US immigration policy – a topic Congress hasn’t been able to find agreement on for two decades, at least. The idea was that, if Democrats would sign on to policies that may turn out not to be that different from what Donald Trump approved while in office, the Republicans would vote to approve aid to Ukraine.
Right from the start, there were plenty of reasons to think the deal wouldn’t come together, and with Republican senate minority leader Mitch McConnell’s reported comments yesterday that he won’t support the deal so Trump can run on curbing immigration, it appears the naysayers were right all along.
Good morning, US politics blog readers. The fallout from Donald Trump’s win in the New Hampshire primary has reached the US Capitol, where reports have emerged that the top Senate Republican is ready to walk away from a deal to send military assistance to Ukraine and Israel. The reason? Republicans now believe Trump has a lock on the party’s presidential nomination, and, on the campaign trail, the former president wants to be able to accuse Joe Biden of failing to stop a surge of migrants crossing the southern border. The agreement under discussion in Congress would have changed immigration policy to discourage migrants, while also unlocking GOP support for military assistance to Israel and Ukraine, a country whose cause the party’s far right has turned against.
It was a delicate bargain with global implications that senators had been hammering out for months, and it all now appears to be falling apart because of Trump. “We don’t want to do anything to undermine him,” top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell said of the former president in a behind-closed-doors meeting with his colleagues, which Punchbowl News first reported. The deal isn’t quite dead yet, but if it indeed unravels, it’s unclear what it will mean for Ukraine’s beleaguered defense against Russia, or Joe Biden’s controversial effort to arm Israel.
Here’s what else is going on today:
Peter Navarro, a former Trump White House aide who was convicted of contempt of Congress for ignoring a subpoena from the January 6 committee, will be sentenced in federal court.
Biden is heading to Wisconsin, a state he really needs to win in November, to announce $5bn in transportation investments from the 2021 infrastructure overhaul he championed.
Trump may or may not testify today, when the trial of author E Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit resumes against him in New York City.