BY ALEXANDER BOLTON AND AL WEAVER
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) on Wednesday floated the possibility to Senate Republicans of splitting Ukraine funding from border security reforms that are coming under heavy criticism from Senate conservatives.
McConnell acknowledged to GOP senators at a Wednesday afternoon meeting that the politics of border security have turned out to be a lot more complicated than he and other Senate Republicans anticipated when they insisted months ago on linking Ukraine funding to border security, according to Senate GOP sources familiar with his comments.
“I think the border portion is dead,” said one Republican senator, who cited McConnell’s remarks to the GOP conference at the Wednesday meeting.
The lawmaker said that McConnell told GOP senators “this has gotten to be a lot more politically difficult than he thought it would be.”
“That sounded to me like the first step toward saying, ‘We just can’t get this done,’” the source said. “I predict the border part falls off.”
Ukraine funding has long been a priority for McConnell, however, and he didn’t back down from his push to provide tens of billions of more dollars in military aid to Kyiv.
A second Senate GOP source familiar with McConnell’s comments said he was “laying out the options” to Republican senators now that it’s become clear that Senate conservatives strongly oppose the border security reforms that were negotiated with Democrats to go along with Ukraine funding.
While McConnell and other Senate Republicans believe the concessions extracted from Democrats would be “huge wins,” the source said, it appears that former President Trump, the party’s likely presidential nominee, will oppose the package.
The source, however, emphasized that McConnell was not “definitive” about removing border security reforms from Ukraine funding and was only laying out the options for the emergency defense supplemental spending package, which Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) will eventually bring to the Senate floor.
Senate Republicans who support the emerging package say it’s becoming clear that Trump will oppose it, which means it has little to no chance of passing the Republican-controlled House.
“The Trump people want to kill it and run on the issue,” said the Senate source familiar with the internal Republican discussion.