Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) touted on Sunday that his bipartisan alternative to the Senate foreign aid package was filed in the House for “expedited consideration.”
“Do you have any confidence that there’s a way to get Republican leadership to move on this?” Margaret Brennan of CBS asked Fitzpatrick and Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME), who cosponsored the House version that includes border security.
Fitzpatrick responded, “I do. We have a bipartisan bill. It’s the only one in the House. And as of Friday, we have filed with the clerk, expedited consideration. Normally, any kind of discharge like that would take 30 days to be considered right; we figured out a way with a parliamentarian to expedite that to a seven-day period.”
Fitzpatrick and Golden’s bill, called the Defending Borders, Defending Democracies Act, would approve over $47 billion in aid to Ukraine as it continues its war against Russia, $10 billion to Israel amid the Jewish state’s conflict with Hamas and other terrorist factions, $5 billion to the Indo-Pacific, and $2 billion for U.S. Central Command operations. Its border provisions include a one-year reinstatement of “Remain in Mexico,” a Trump-era policy requiring asylum-seekers to be outside the U.S. in their native country until an immigration court date.
Still, Fitzpatrick and Golden’s bill is unlikely to earn broad support, and Democrats have urged House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to take up the Senate bill, a $118 billion national security package. Johnson notably said the Senate bill was “dead on arrival” in the House since it did not “come close to ending the border catastrophe” the speaker blamed President Joe Biden for creating.
“This is time-sensitive; it’s existential,” Fitzpatrick told Brennan on Sunday. “I just got back from Ukraine. Avdiivka fell in the past seven days. We lost Laken Riley in the past seven days. And in the past seven days, 200 families had to bury their kids because of fentanyl. So what our bill does is it combines border security with this foreign aid, both existential.”
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Golden said on Sunday that he isn’t ruling out consideration of amendments from other lawmakers related to humanitarian aid for the House alternative bill.
“Potentially, yes,” Golden said. “Although I think that we also have to set priorities. So at the end of the day, what are the most important crises that we have to deal within the here and now in the very short term, and I would say that that would be securing our border, and also helping avoid battlefield catastrophes in Ukraine.”
