Republican senators, including Tom Cotton and Mitt Romney, expressed their dissatisfaction with a classified briefing on foreign aid for Ukraine and Israel, claiming it devolved into heated arguments about border security.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell clashed over the focus of the meeting, with Republicans walking out due to the absence of discussions on border security.
The briefing’s contentious nature underscored the deep divide between the parties, with Senate Republicans planning to filibuster President Biden’s funding package due to insufficient immigration restrictions. (Trending: Joe Biden Admits He’s ‘Not Sure’ About Running If Trump Wasn’t)
“Well, usually senators don’t scream at each other in front of, you know, the secretary of defense and so forth,” Josh Hawley added.
“What most, or many, Republican senators want to talk about here is the border, and [Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer] would prefer not to do that in this venue; obviously, there’s nobody there to talk about the border,” he said.
“So that was a point of some heated disagreement.”
The meeting “was immediately hijacked by Leader McConnell,” Schumer said.
“The first question instead of asking our panelists — he called on [Oklahoma Republican Sen. James] Lankford to give a five-minute talk about the negotiations on the border. And that wasn’t the purpose of the meeting, at all.”
“One of them started — it was disrespectful — started screaming at one of the generals and challenging him to why he didn’t go to the border,” Schumer said.
“Schumer [was] running his big mouth, claiming that it was Republicans who, quote, unquote, injected immigration for border security in this debate — and I had none of that,” Cotton recalled.
“I said: ‘Nope, Republicans haven’t injected border security into this debate. Joe Biden sent us a supplemental bill with border provisions in it.’ He had the misfortune of spreading those lies right after someone had handed me a microphone.”
“People got up and walked out, because this is a waste of time,” North Dakota’s Kevin Cramer said.
“To say it was a waste of time would be an understatement,” Missouri’s Eric Schmitt added.
“It was insulting to have a meeting in there — we’ve had, like, I don’t know, a dozen meetings on Ukraine — to not have anybody in there from [the Department of Homeland Security] is the height of — if there was a Mount Rushmore of tone deafness, Chuck Schumer would have his face on the mountain.”
“We want to help Ukraine and Israel, but we’ve got to have the Democrats recognize that the trade here, the deal, is we stop the open border,” Romney said.
“They don’t want to do that. So Republicans are just walking out of the briefing because the people there are not willing to actually discuss what it takes to get a deal done.”
“It started off pretty bad … a lot of tension in the room because nobody talked about the border,” Lindsey Graham added.
“In case you don’t have a television or you’ve been living in a cave, you would know that most Republicans feel like we need to address the broken border.”
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