The democrats are in charge of the White House and Senate, with a weak Republican majority in the House, exactly what conservative bills do you think would pass in regards to our southern border?
"Leveraging it to secure our border", is incredible republican naivety, because it assumes Biden cares that much about Ukraine that he would stop the flood of illegals that benefits democrats in elections. Just last week the administration was telling Ukraine to stop attacking Russian oil refineries because it might raise the world price of oil, threatening Biden's re-election.
All Biden cares about is being re-elected. A Ukraine collapse would just be blamed on Republicans.
Republicans could have gained some measures for securing the border, *IF*, they had maintained message discipline. Remember McCarthy did get some (admittedly quite modest) concessions in exchange for raising the debt ceiling, because he was able to maintain message discipline.
Instead of making sure that every republican (or at least member of leadership) that talked to the press brought up Biden’s and Schumer’s intransigence on one point, we had one group of republicans who talked border security, a group that talked about Ukraine, a group that were rooting for Russia, a group that would talk of fiscal offsets, etc.. What was the publicly repeated talking point about the one concession that would get the overwhelming bulk of Republicans on board?