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WASHINGTON -- The future remains uncertain for a national security supplemental bill to provide much-needed funding for Ukraine and Israel but now strips out additional tools for enforcement of asylum and illegal immigration at the southern border.
The amended national security supplemental bill - up for consideration in the U.S. Senate Thursday – would appropriate $60.1 billion for aid for Ukraine as it continues to resist a Russian invasion of the country. It would appropriate $14.1 billion to Israel engaged in conflict with Hamas after Israeli citizens were attacked and hostages taken last October.
The bill also includes $10 billion for humanitarian aid and additional funding for Taiwan and Indo-Pacific national security to provide a buffer to Chinese plans for expansion in the region.
The bill originally included $20.2 billion for border security funding at the U.S. and Mexican border. The bill's border provisions would have given President Joe Biden and future presidents the express authority to close the border when illegal crossing exceed 4,000 or more per day, making it mandatory to close the border if crossings exceed a larger per-day number.
Additionally, the bill would tighten the reasons used for migrants reaching the border to seek asylum, increase funding for border agents, and expand the number of detention facilities. But a cloture vote Wednesday to consider the full national security supplemental with the border funding failed 49-50 even after the border provisions were agreed to by a bipartisan group of senators. The vote needed 60 senators in order for the bill to be considered.
U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., was one of the senators who voted against the cloture motion Wednesday, heeding the calls of West Virginians who urged her to reject the motion. While a vocal supporter of additional funding for border security and enforcement actions by the Biden administration over the last several years, Capito told reporters Thursday during an afternoon press call that she did not trust that Biden would enforce the proposed law even though Biden expressed support for the bill. The supplemental was also dead on arrival in the U.S. House of Representatives, where Republican leadership said they would not take up the bill.
"President Biden is a colossal failure at the border," Capito said. "West Virginians feel strongly about fairness, and fairness is not letting 302,000 people into this country like we did in the month of December, so we have to acknowledge this is a colossal failure.
"I think there's a lack of trust as to whether President Biden would actually even enforce laws because he has ability now to lessen illegal immigration, and he doesn't use those measures," Capito said. "We saw President Trump use those measures. President Biden chooses not to. And so I just think there's a lot of concern and worry, and so we have to do it the right way."
Holding his own call with press Thursday afternoon, U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., said he supported the entire national security package with the border funding and asylum provisions.
"I had a chance to vote on something I thought would help my country," Manchin said. "Everything in this bill made the border a lot safer and helped us to be able to control that better than today. That's why I voted for it and that's how I'd explain it to anybody who wants to talk about it."
Manchin said he was disappointed his Republican colleagues would play politics in order to keep the border an issue for the 2024 presidential election.
"It really reaffirmed why I'm not running again; why I would not want to run again," said Manchin, who announced his retirement from the U.S. Senate last year, choosing instead to explore the possibility of a third-party presidential run. "I was sent here and thought we could do so much good. I was more discouraged (Wednesday) from what I've seen."
The amended national security supplemental could also be dead on arrival in the House, where some Republicans are hostile to approving additional funding for Ukraine. The House attempted to move a stand-alone funding bill for Israel Wednesday, but it fell short of the two-thirds vote needed. Capito said Ukraine funding is needed to limit Russian President Vladimir Putin from attacking other neighboring countries.
"I don't know where this is going to go," Capito said. "I'm supportive of Ukraine, because I want to push Putin back. If we're worried about being in a forever war, a forever war is if Putin wins and then he begins another front on a new forever war, and that includes our men and women in uniform ... It's hard to say what the end's going to be here. I don't know if we get to it today or if we have to come back in two weeks or one week."