Evening summary
We’re wrapping up our live politics coverage for tonight. A recap of today’s key events is below. Tomorrow, the supreme court will hear oral arguments on whether Donald Trump is eligible to run for office, a case that represents the culmination of years of work by left-leaning watchdog groups who argue that Trump’s conduct on 6 January amounts to insurrection against the US government, and should bar him from holding office.
From today:
Senate Republicans rejected a bipartisan compromise bill that combined changes in US immigration policy and additional security measures at the US-Mexico border with nearly $100bn in foreign aid, including to Ukraine and Israel.
The Biden-backed bipartisan compromise had been denounced by immigrant rights and human rights groups like Amnesty International, who called the proposals cruel, inhumane, and likely to lead to more suffering and death.
Congressional Republicans faced criticism, including from their own members, for internal dysfunction after the failure of the bipartisan border compromise bill followed the flopped House GOP attempt to impeach Democratic homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Democrats are now using the GOP votes against a border deal to campaign against Republicans, arguing that party members caved to Trump, who had publicly urged them not to pass the deal. “You do not let a fire burn so that Donald Trump can campaign on the ashes,” Democratic senator Patty Murray said.
The Senate planned to move ahead with votes to advance a simpler bill that would simply provide foreign military aid to Ukraine and Israel, a measure that Biden said he would support. But as Republicans negotiated over whether they could add back in some border policy measures to the foreign aid bill, and the clocked ticked later into evening, forward movement stalled.
But independent Sen. Bernie Sanders had already said earlier he would oppose legislation to provide military aid to Israel: “Israel has the right to defend itself against Hamas’s terrorism, but it does not have the right to go to war against the entire Palestinian people,” Sanders said, saying “over 27,000 Palestinians have been killed and 67,000 wounded – two-thirds of whom are women and children” since the war began.
Still waiting….
It is now nearly 5:30pm in Washington.
The Senate is still working on its 2:30p vote.
— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) February 7, 2024
