President Joe Biden hosted congressional leaders and the top lawmakers on key national security committees Wednesday as the White House and House Republicans continue to talk past each other on what the president has called an urgent funding request.
Speaker Mike Johnson, who previously met in person with the president shortly after taking office in October and spoke by phone with Biden about border issues about a week ago, has remained focused on those issues — but the White House points to negotiations with Senate Republicans led by James Lankford, R-Okla., as the path to progress. The speaker has not been at the table for those discussions.
And Biden may have made an impassioned plea to help Ukraine in the White House meeting on Wednesday, but afterward it seemed plain that the supplemental spending bill’s legislative future still hinges, as it has for weeks, on a separate partisan row over managing a steady flow of immigrants on the U.S.-Mexico border.
