The reason that Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) is mad today is very convoluted, so bear with me.
A few months back, Lankford was one of the few Senate Republicans willing to publicly criticize his colleagues for killing a bipartisan immigration bill that he helped negotiate and that would’ve tightened security measures at the border, among other things. It was killed at Donald Trump’s demand.
Trump asked Senate Republicans to defeat the bill — which had wide bipartisan support — because he didn’t want to hand Democrats an election-year win. The perception of a “crisis” along the border was, he felt, good for the presidential candidacy of an immigration hardliner such as himself. So Trump demanded that his party’s senators do nothing to fix the crisis about which they had constantly professed to be so very alarmed. On command, Senate Republicans crumpled.
At the time, a frustrated Lankford was one of the few to publicly call out Trump as the force behind the bill’s defeat. He even received flack for noticeably signaling agreement with President Biden during the State of the Union address, nodding as the President outlined some provisions of the bipartisan bill that Lankford’s colleagues had just spiked.
As we creep closer and closer to Election Day, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is doing what any majority leader would do in his position — taking advantage of his party’s majority in the upper chamber to set up votes on bills representative of key issues that Biden and Democrats are campaigning on this fall, like abortion and contraceptive access.
Schumer also chose to re-highlight Republican hypocrisy: On Thursday, the border security bill that Republicans had killed in February was brought forward for a vote again — and Republicans defeated it again. Only Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) voted with Democrats in support of the measure. Some progressive Dems also voted against the proposal.
And Lankford is mad, now — criticizing Schumer for using the bill as a “prop” during an election year and forcing Republicans to defeat a bill they actually like for a second time.
“This bill today is a prop, it’s a pure messaging vote and a fundraising piece for Democrats to be able to run out and say, ‘See, we want to do border security and those rascally Republicans don’t want to do it,’ which is absolutely absurd,” Lankford (R-Okla.) told Newsmax Thursday.
“We need to get together, stop the politics and the messaging and the Democrat fundraising emails that are going out on this, and let’s actually solve the problem,” Lankford said.
Sad 🙁
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