A bill Democrats say would improve border security failed for the second time to pass in the Senate after enough Republicans failed to support it.
The “Border Act,” which was previously blocked in February when linked to foreign aid, failed to meet the 60-vote threshold as a standalone measure to have the upper chamber invoke cloture and proceed with consideration.
Fifty members opposed advancing the bill, while only 43 members supported moving forward with the legislation, which Democrats revived this month. One of the members who spent months helping to craft the bill, Senator James Lankford (R-OK), criticized the way the leadership handled the revival of the legislation.
“I’m making it very clear with my vote that this is a stunt — not an attempt to do anything,” Lankford told Newsmax. “And I’m going to be interested in how many Democrats walk away from this.”
Retiring Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, a former Democrat-turned-Independent who still caucuses with her old party, criticized them and Republicans alike, accusing them of engaging in “political theater” rather than seriously addressing President Joe Biden’s lax immigration and border security policies.
House Republicans warned that the bill would be “dead on arrival” if it reached them and urged the Senate to pass H.R. 2 instead. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has refused to consider this more stringent border security bill, which the House passed last year.
Biden’s policies have driven immigration to the top of the list of concerns most Americans have heading into the fall elections.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) released a statement after the vote, saying Schumer “should join House Republicans in demanding President Biden reverse course and use his executive authority to finally secure the border and protect American families.”
A new survey sponsored by a left-leaning organization has more bad news for Biden following his horrific debate.
Citing the data, the New York Post noted that former President Donald Trump is now leading Biden in all of the most competitive states, just weeks away from the Democratic nominating convention.
The Post reported: “Biden is behind Trump by roughly 4 percentage points in the six key states: Pennsylvania (43% to 48%), Georgia (42% to 47%), Michigan (44% to 45%), Arizona (42% to 46%), Wisconsin (44% to 47%) and Nevada (41% to 47%), according to the poll by Emerson College and sponsored by Democrats for the Next Generation.”
North Carolina is often mentioned as a battleground state, too, but it was not included in the survey, The Post reported.
According to a Puck News report last week, Biden is losing even more ground to Trump in the battleground states, but also, reliably blue states that have voted Democrat for decades are also in play.
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The nonprofit OpenLabs “conducts polling and message-testing for a constellation of Democratic groups, including the 501(c)4 nonprofit associated with Future Forward, the preferred Super PAC for Biden’s reelection campaign,” veteran political journalist and former CNN correspondent Peter Hamby wrote. OpenLabs is a Democrat/left polling firm.
Hamby wrote that the data found that 40 percent of voters who supported Biden in 2020 now think he should leave the race. An OpenLabs poll in May had that number at only 25 percent.
“This is, of course, only a single poll, conducted during the initial aftershocks of the debate. It will take a few weeks to determine if Biden’s slippage in the polls is a trend and not a blip,” he wrote. “But given their reputation inside the party and connections to Future Forward, OpenLabs is a firm that Democratic campaigns take seriously.”
“In the tipping-point state of Pennsylvania, Biden now trails by 7 points, compared to 5 points before the debate,” Hamby wrote. “He has also dropped in Michigan, where he now trails Trump by 7. OpenLabs also found that he is now losing by roughly 10 points in Georgia and Arizona, and by almost 9 points in Nevada.”
As bad as that is for Biden, it gets worse.
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“Biden is now only winning by a fraction of a point in Virginia, Maine, Minnesota, and New Mexico — and he’s now only winning Colorado by around 2 points,” Hamby wrote.
Following his disaster debate with Trump, Democrats have been calling on Biden to drop out of the race, but the president has remained defiant.
“This morning, I sent a letter to my fellow Democrats on Capitol Hill. In it, I shared my thoughts about this moment in our campaign. It’s time to come together, move forward as a unified party, and defeat Donald Trump,” Biden wrote.
Biden wrote in the letter that he “declined” to step aside and argues it is time for the party drama “to end.”
