Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has thrown in the towel on getting a bill for military aid to Ukraine through the Senate in 2023. He had postponed the Senate’s Christmas break by a week, hoping to fashion an agreement. But yesterday, he and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell issued a joint statement expressing the hope that a deal for aid to Ukraine (along with Israel and Taiwan) could be reached “early in the new year.” It added that senators and the administration will keep working this year “to work in good faith toward finalizing” a potential deal.
House Speaker Mike Johnson has called on the White House for the impossible, to present a clear plan on how pouring more money into Ukraine would help it prevail in the conflict with Russia. But it remains to be seen whether he will join many other Republicans in agreeing to send the money, once they extract the right price from the administration on closing the U.S.’s southern border. U.S. media report that the officials negotiating the border deal have agreed in principle to make it harder for migrants to claim asylum and to make it easier to expedite expulsions, but they’ve not yet agreed on other issues—e.g., which migrants should be kept in custody versus which to be paroled.
