The reason the bill failed to secure the border, however, is because McConnell, after deputizing Lankford, prevented the senator from Oklahoma from attaching Ukraine aid to any real, concrete metric of bringing down the number of migrants entering the United States.

“Without telling anybody, apparently, McConnell, on his own, told Lankford that’s not even on the table,” Johnson said. Later, “we had that confirmed by Sinema, who said that James never asked for that.” For Johnson, it was “a breach of [McConnell’s] leadership position” by blowing off the consensus view of the conference.

After “McConnell told Lankford he couldn’t do that,” Scott decided to ask leadership if those were the marching orders leadership gave Lankford at a Senate GOP conference luncheon. “It’s my understanding that that leadership has decided that they will not allow metrics to be tied to Ukraine aid,” Scott said, paraphrasing his remarks at the luncheon. “Nobody said it wasn’t true.” With an exasperated tone, Scott repeated himself: “I brought it up and nobody said it wasn’t true.”

(via Ace of Spades HQ)