Behind the scenes of how we passed the national security supplemental

Last Tuesday night around 9pm, I walked up to the desk in the well of the Senate chamber and voted “aye” on the $95 billion long overdue national security supplemental that sends desperately needed funding to help Ukraine defend itself, dedicates money to the defense of Israel from terrorism, and funds humanitarian needs in Gaza and all around the world.

It was the strangest, longest road a piece of legislation has taken in Congress for quite some time, and at various points I found myself acting as a central character in its formation.

From October 2023 to February 2024, I was the lead Democratic negotiator on the immigration and border reform provisions that Republicans insisted were necessary to win their votes on the broader national security bill. Democrats took them at their word, and for five months I negotiated with Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma, Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, and representatives from the White House, eventually unveiling a sweeping bill that, if passed, would have given President Biden the tools to help get the border under control.

Those negotiations seemed, at times, like they would never end. They took every possible form. In the most formal setting, we would gather in a big ornate room just off the Senate floor. Lankford, Sinema and I would normally sit next to each other on one side of the table, and staff from Senator Schumer’s office and Senator McConnell’s office, along with our staff, would fill in the ends of the big, long conference table. On the other side would sit Homeland Security Secretary Ali Mayorkas and top White House staffers.

Other times, it would just be Lankford, Sinema, me, and our key staff. Those were the times we would have the most honest conversations about what Republicans and Democrats could live with. And then, at the most sensitive moments, it was just Lankford, Sinema and me. I remember when we were at the end of the negotiations – this session was in Sinema’s conference room – the three of us went into her personal office alone and went through the handwritten list of open items that Sinema kept. We realized there were no open items, and we looked each other in the eye and pledged to do everything possible to get the votes necessary to pass the bill.

I also remember the night when we finally released the text of the bill publicly. I was in my office at the Capitol late that Sunday night, and I started to scroll through social media to find Trump’s immigration team tearing the bill to shreds online and threatening to destroy any Republicans who would support the bill. I remember texting Sinema, “they are going to burn this bill down tonight, before the sun even comes up.” And that’s exactly what Trump and his henchmen did – they told Republicans that it would be bad for Trump if more law and order was brought to the border, they wanted to kill the bill to keep the border a mess.

After our immigration compromise was torpedoed by Trump, Republicans came to their senses in the Senate and voted for the Ukraine bill without the immigration proposal they had earlier demanded. The House dithered over our bill for months, insisting that they still wanted an immigration reform proposal. I kept pointing out that there was, in fact, a bipartisan immigration and border reform bill ready to go. House Republicans ended up doing the exact same thing as Senate Republicans – backing down from voting on our proposal because they feared that Republicans’ election prospects would be hurt if they could no longer use the border to cut campaign ads.

But the truth is that we had to go through the exercise of showing Republicans that they weren’t actually willing to vote for a bill to fix the border. We had to call their bluff. That was the only way to get them to actually vote for the Ukraine bill. I wish all my efforts hadn’t been for naught, but I’m glad to have played a central role in getting the bill across the finish line.

It is not too late for Ukraine. But it almost was. By April, Russian forces were firing five times as much artillery on a daily basis as Ukrainian forces. Consequently, the Ukrainians have recently lost ground in the war, and even though U.S. weapons are now flowing again, it will take time and many lives to make up the time lost.

But recall that most serious military analysts thought Russia would overrun Ukraine in the first few days of the war in 2022. That did not happen. Why? Because the Ukrainian people rose up and fought with every ounce of their being to defend their homes and their country. And they will continue to do so. Until they win.

It matters to the U.S. because if we return to a world in which big nations are allowed to invade and annex smaller nations, then the entire post-WWII world order falls apart. The U.S. could very well find itself at war with Russia or China or another big power. And in the nuclear age, that would be a cataclysm.

I was proud to play a small but significant role in getting the Ukraine bill across the finish line. As I walked out of the Senate on Tuesday night, I passed Senator Lankford. I grabbed his shoulder.

“The universe works in mysterious ways, James,” I told him.