Okay, this is getting … well, interesting? It’s now 100% clear the border deal is dead. In my first post an hour or so ago it was 98% dead. The ambiguity has now been removed. That’s no big surprise.

What’s at least a bit surprising is the next move. Republicans are now at least saying that Plan B is to strip out all the border stuff and leave in the aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. But the key to remember is that that is how we got here in the first place. Democrats were trying to move an aid bill and Republicans said no aid without a border crackdown. Democrats at first refused linkage but eventually gave way. Then they negotiated this border deal. Now Senate Republicans, at least for the moment, are saying they’ll go back to the aid bill they refused if it didn’t address the border.

LOL.

New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella announced today that Deep Fake voter suppression robocalls aimed at dissuading voters from voting in last months Democratic primary have been traced to a Texas-based firm called Life Corporation, owned by a man named Walter Monk. The calls used a voice like President Biden’s and told voters not to “waste” their vote in the primary, implying that you could vote in the primary or the general election but not both.

Monk seems to have a long and pretty sordid history of low-rent robocall type operations, but at least on first pass not a clear history of involvement in politics.

The big, big news of the morning is of course the D.C. appellate decision that Donald Trump has no immunity as a former president. But I wanted to briefly revisit the half-day life of the Senate bipartisan border deal that collapsed last night in the face of Trump’s demands.

There’s a bit more to it that I wanted to walk you through. Not a lot more. But a bit more. And those bits have some significance.

After the bill was released, House GOP leaders repeatedly insisted it was absolutely positively dead in the House. The very transparent aim of these statements was that they wanted their Senate Republican colleagues to kill it in the Senate. Because the truth is that it’s not at all clear it was dead in the House if it was allowed to get a vote. So the thinking from the House GOP was: you’re going to put us in a very tough position if you pass the bill and send it to us. So kill it in the Senate first. At least for now, that’s just what their Senate colleagues did.

I noted below that we might know tonight where the Senate GOP is going on the compromise legislation they said they wanted. Well, it’s not even 8 p.m. And we know. They’re going to filibuster it. The explanation of the evening is that voting this week is too soon. They need more time. But of course more time is just to build opposition to it. Trump was able to shut this down pretty quickly. If anything it’s now turning into a secondary effort to show Trump’s dominance over McConnell in the Senate. But that’s a topic for another post. The White House now needs to shift gears and make this a central element of its campaign. There was a bipartisan compromise to crackdown on border crossings. It included lots of what Republicans have demanded for years. But Republicans killed it because Donald Trump told them to.

According to The Wall Street Journal’s Yaroslav Trofimov, Russian forces in Ukraine are about to capture the first Ukrainian city since the capture of Bakhmut last May. According to him it’s a “direct result of acute ammunition shortage — caused by the U.S. Congress withholding further military aid to Ukraine.”