Senate Republicans block border security bill as they campaign on border chaos

Senate Democrats failed to advance a bipartisan border security bill Thursday, with nearly every Republican voting to filibuster it as Donald Trump wields border chaos as a centerpiece of his campaign against President Joe Biden.

The vote was 43-50, falling short of the 60 needed to proceed. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska was the only GOP senator to vote to advance the bill Thursday, while six Democrats voted with the remaining Republican senators to block it.

The vote caps a peculiar sequence of events after Senate Republican leaders insisted on a border security agreement last year and signed off on a compromise bill before they knifed it. Democrats, wary of their political vulnerability when it comes to migration, had acceded to a variety of GOP demands to raise the bar for asylum-seekers and tighten border controls. Trump pressured GOP lawmakers to kill any deal that wasn’t “perfect,” and he succeeded.