The Administration, the Senate Border Bill, and a Brewing Constitutional Imbalance
Failures of the press, and a missed opportunity for the GOP that’s now being used against them
By Andrew R. Arthur on September 4, 2024
Vice President (and Democratic presidential candidate) Kamala Harris continues to blast her opponent, former President Trump, for allegedly tanking a “bipartisan” Senate border bill that died in the upper chamber shortly after it was introduced, only to die again weeks later. As the Center has explained, the bill would only have made the border crisis worse, but the reason why Democrats have been pushing it so hard goes to a larger constitutional imbalance that a Wall Street Journal op-ed discussed over the Labor Day weekend — an imbalance that the Biden-Harris administration continues to exacerbate.
The Senate Border Bill, in Brief. Heading into the 2024 presidential election, the chaos at the Southwest border quickly became a major political liability for the then-candidate, President Joe Biden.
Then, late last fall, three senators — James Lankford (R-Okla.), Krysten Sinema (I-Ariz.), and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) — convened behind closed doors with administration officials to craft a response to that crisis in exchange for $61 billion in war funding for Ukraine.
Those talks were so hush-hush that even seasoned politicos had no idea what the trio had in mind. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Biden himself plainly knew the terms, however, because on January 26, the White House issued the following statement:
https://cis.org/Arthur/Administration-Senate-Border-Bill-and-Brewing-Constitutional-Imbalance
