Manchin slams Senate for leaving Washington without border deal

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) expressed his disapproval on Wednesday with the Senate deciding to “pack up and head home” without a border security deal.

Senators were forced to come to Washington, D.C., this week on their scheduled Christmas recess to close out unfinished business for the upper chamber but also to give negotiators more time to reach a compromise on border reforms.

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Negotiators continued their work on the border security deal, which is needed to pass the Senate’s defense supplemental spending package, while the 60 or so members who actually showed up voted to confirm the 11 stalled four-star generals held over from Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s (R-AL) blanket hold on military promotions. The chamber also passed a short-term extension of the Federal Aviation Administration’s authority.

But members broke for the abbreviated week on Wednesday without a handshake agreement on the border deal, meaning the Senate would be punting on the issue until January.

That reality infuriated members on both sides of the aisle, including Manchin, who described it as “a failure.”

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

“The decision to leave Washington with our work unfinished is an unacceptable disservice to the constituents we are elected to serve,” Manchin said in a statement on Wednesday. “Let me be perfectly clear — we should not be abandoning our responsibilities in favor of a holiday vacation. The American people deserve better.”

Still, Manchin said he was “encouraged by the bipartisan negotiations this week” and “optimistic that my colleagues on both sides of the aisle can come together and commit to passing commonsense legislation that secures our Southern Border in the new year.”

Manchin’s Republican colleagues also expressed their frustration about how the Senate operated this week, though for different reasons.

“We’re here this week because [Senate Minority Leader] Chuck Schumer [D-NY] had to walk his members through the seven stages of grief on the fact that we were not going to get a border deal because actually drafting good immigration policy takes more than four days under the crush of the Christmas holiday,” Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday.

“There is no reason for us to be here,” he continued. “There is no reason to keep the members here other than to apply leverage on them over some last-minute nominations and over a border deal that was never going to come together on the timeline that they promised. It’s absurd.”

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) concurred with Vance, saying it felt like senators were just “marking time.”

“There is no reason for us to be here,” Murkowski told the Washington Examiner later Tuesday. “I am here because I was holding out some level of hope that the talks might be productive and might yield some progress. It’s clear that we’re not going to get a deal that the Senate could [immediately] take up.”

Murkowski then revealed that she planned to head home after the next series of votes to visit with residents affected by the recent landslide in Wrangell, Alaska.

“You weigh these things,” she explained. “I’m here; Alaskans have asked me to represent them. They want me to be here working for them and casting votes, but when it seems like we’re just kind of processing things just to keep people busy, I think Alaskans have some things back home that they would like me to be present for as well.”

“This could have been avoided if the leader had better time management in the first place,” Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-NE) said, referring to Schumer, who controls the floor. “All these things could have been done months and months ago if the leader had actually scheduled them. We could have worked.”

Not everyone in the Senate was opposed to the idea of being in Washington longer, though.

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“No. 1, I don’t think anybody who came back expected that we’re going to have a deal,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) told the Washington Examiner. “No. 2, I came back because the majority leader scheduled votes, and that’s my job. Plenty of Americans are working this week.”

“No. 3, could all of this have been done earlier? Of course. Sometimes it takes the Senate weeks, months, even years to get nothing done, but that’s the way it is, and it’s part of my job,” he continued.