Senate leaders are expressing confidence ahead of Wednesday’s White House meeting that the defense supplemental spending package will be completed soon.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said on Wednesday that it is his “assumption” that the upper chamber would take up $106 billion legislation by sometime next week, while Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) offered his most positive comments to date on the status of the bill.
“It’s not unusual for the House and Senate to be in a different place on lots of issues,” McConnell told reporters, noting the bicameral differences. “The way this needs to go forward is for one of the bodies to pass something that would actually get a signature.”
“The supplemental in the Senate is designed to actually pass,” he continued. “Which would mean not only would it have to get through the House, but be signed by the president, so we can only deal with what we have before us in the Senate. ”
Schumer, meanwhile, said shortly after that, ”The work is not done on the supplemental, but I am really hopeful that negotiations are continuing in the right direction. We are closer than we have ever been.”
“The sense of cooperation between Leader McConnell and myself and the leadership of both sides — you’ve heard what Sens. Thune and Cornyn have said lately — bodes very well for getting things done,” the majority leader said. “For the first time, I’m optimistic. For the first time, I think the chances of getting it done in the Senate are greater than not getting it done.”
The duo made the comments just before heading to the White House for their meeting with President Joe Biden on the package, which is being carefully crafted in such a way to be able to pass the Republican-led House.
A bipartisan working group of senators has spent over a month negotiating a border security deal, which would be added to a defense spending bill that includes aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. Negotiators on both sides have acknowledged that the border measure is critical to passing the legislation through both chambers.
McConnell, who has been Ukraine’s staunchest GOP ally since Russia launched its war last February, has said he supports the larger supplemental package as long as it includes “credible” border policy changes.
Sens. James Lankford (R-OK) and Chris Murphy (D-CT) have been leading the negotiations, which have centered largely on changes to federal asylum policy and how the Biden administration uses the humanitarian parole authority. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) has also been heavily involved in the talks.
There have also been reports that the White House has offered to establish a new border expulsion law and increase mandatory detention rates as part of the negotiations, though no one from the Senate working group or the Biden administration has confirmed as much publicly.
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House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who will be in attendance at Wednesday’s meeting, has publicly insisted that the border provision in Biden’s defense legislation be a version of H.R. 2, House Republicans’ signature border bill. Senate GOP negotiators, however, have pushed back on the notion that they are demanding Democrats agree to H.R. 2.
Negotiations now largely center on disputes over parole system reforms, which remains the biggest sticking point.
