It would be tempting to describe the negotiation over the Senate’s border bill, which died this week, shortly after it was introduced, as having been a pointless waste of time. That would certainly be the view of frustrated staffers and reporters who spent long hours over the last few months working on it and covering it.

“It looks to me, and to most of our members, as if we have no real chance here to make a law,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday afternoon as he stuck a fork in it, following a couple of days of heated meetings in which Republicans groused about the border package that Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford—acting at McConnell’s behest—struck with Democrats.

But while it would’ve been nice if the proposal could have reached this outcome—instant death—on a more abbreviated timeline, this fruitless endeavor was still a necessary step towards resolving the battle that underlies it: Discovering the legislative path, if there still is one, towards getting additional military aid to Ukraine.

This saga goes back to the aftermath of the 2022 midterm elections.

Republicans took control of the House of Representatives by a far slimmer margin than they had projected, empowering a far-right faction that was always skeptical of arming Ukraine to hold disproportionate sway within the conference. Congressional leaders at the time, along with anyone who paid even vague attention to politics, could foresee the problems that Speaker Kevin McCarthy would have when he took the gavel. So, in Dec. 2022, Senate leaders and outgoing House Democratic leaders tucked as much Ukraine funding as they could into a government funding bill that would last through Sept. 2023.

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