Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer is preparing to quickly turn the page Wednesday from his chamber’s doomed border security and immigration package to a “clean” supplemental spending measure for Ukraine, Israel and the Indo-Pacific.
After a 1 p.m. Wednesday cloture vote on the motion to proceed, which is expected to fall short of the necessary 60 votes, Schumer, D-N.Y., intends to call up an amended version of the bipartisan $118.3 billion emergency appropriations bill. The same procedural vote on the scaled-back measure, which would lop off $20.2 billion in border-related spending and over 100 pages of immigration policy language from the original, would occur later on Wednesday.
A Senate Democratic aide familiar with the plan said Schumer has the ability under the rules to offer a motion to reconsider a previous motion to take up the bill with an amendment, since he filed cloture on the motion to proceed to the underlying shell vehicle. If Schumer had called up the motion to proceed to the bill again using his motion to reconsider available since December’s rejected cloture vote, this option would not have been available.
