Porter: Border Deal Is a Bad Deal, and GOP Is Bad for Tanking It

On Thursday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “All In,” U.S. Senate candidate Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) criticized the prospective border as giving up “the long-standing obligation of this country to help people who are seeking — who are fleeing persecution” and also criticized Republicans for opposing the border deal.

Host Chris Hayes said, “The only reason those two things are linked was because it was a gambit to try to get a vote in the House, because Johnson doesn’t want to bring up a Ukraine vote, and they want some cost for it. Basically, they demanded a cost, we’re only going to vote for Ukraine aid and let you bring it up, if you give us our border bill. So, then they had negotiations, now they have the border bill. Now here’s this weird package — which I agree with you — why are they linked? Blown up.”

Porter responded, “I think when people say that we should have bipartisanship, and we should work together, they’re not talking about this kind of naked political leverage over each other, where one of us gives up something entirely, like the long-standing obligation of this country to help people who are seeking — who are fleeing persecution in order to do something else, which is defend our position in terms of democracy and protecting Ukraine from invasion. That’s not what we mean by bipartisanship, we mean coming together, finding solutions, not quite agreeing on those solutions, and then giving and taking at the margin. That’s not what this deal is.”