Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who helped craft the bipartisan border security bill earlier this year, said he will oppose his own bill when Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) bring it back up for a vote this week.
In February, Senate Republicans killed the effort to pass the bipartisan bill on Donald Trump’s orders.
Lankford slammed his colleagues at the time for playing politics with the country’s national security “because it’s a presidential election year.”
Months later, Lankford said he will not be supporting Democrats efforts to revive the bill, dismissing it as a political exercise.
“It’s no longer a bill. Now it’s a prop,” Lankford said in an interview on CNN’s The Source, according to a clip highlighted by Mediaite.
“We spent four months sitting down in a bipartisan way to be able to work out, ‘what do we think we can actually get passed?’ Obviously I was not successful in getting something that could actually get passed,” he continued. “The problem still remains. Everyone knows that this bill is not going to pass and Senator Schumer is bringing it back up to try to bludgeon people.”
Host Kaitlan Collins pointed out that Lankford also knew that the bill was not going to pass in February when he supported it then.
“That’s now several months ago,” he responded. “We know it’s not gonna pass again. Senator Schumer is just bringing this up for a political reasons…. this is not a bipartisan attempt to be able to solve something.”
The bipartisan border deal raises the bar for migrants to qualify for asylum and quickly turn away those who fail to meet it. It also allows the president to shut down the border if certain triggers are met.
