On Tuesday’s broadcast of Bloomberg’s “Balance of Power,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) responded to a question on why Democrats didn’t pass a border bill when they controlled both chambers of Congress and the White House by stating that coming up with immigration bills is hard and by pointing to other immigration bills that came up in other Congresses that failed.
Co-host Kailey Leinz asked, “Senator, what we heard from President Biden, speaking from the White House today, was that he intends to make this known to voters that if this fails, he says it fails because of Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans. But doesn’t the fact remain that Democrats have had control of the Senate since 2021, Biden’s been in the White House since 2021? Is this just an issue of Democrats not deciding to do something about this earlier when they had control?”
Warner responded, “I would put this, Kailey, there have been three…major reform efforts in the last 12 years. … 2014, I think, when the bipartisan bill came out of the Senate, Republicans in the House rejected it. 2018, there was an effort around DREAMers, Republicans rejected it. Yes, you can criticize these immigration bills, they’re hard, the border bills are hard, that’s why it took intense negotiations for over four months. At the end of the day, a product was put together, and candidly, I feel a little bad for the Senate Republican leader, he supported it. Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), very very conservative, someone selected by the Republicans to be their lead negotiator, he thought it was a good bill. Everything was moving along until the presumptive Republican nominee says, no, I don’t really want to solve this problem. I want to use this as a campaign issue. So, I think, after tomorrow’s vote, if Biden and Trump want to litigate that, I think the American public will reach a conclusion, who put forward a plan that actually was bipartisan, that could have stopped the flow on the border, who wants to use it as a political issue?”
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