Senate advances $95 billion Ukraine, Israel funding bill, faces uphill battle as budget talks loom

Senators on Thursday advanced a foreign aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, garnering momentum for a funding package that has been a persistent thorn in the side of federal budget talks over the past few months.

By a final tally of 67-32, senators voted to begin debate on a $95 billion aid package to fund Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and humanitarian aid in war-torn regions. 

“This is a good first step,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said on the Senate floor following the vote.

The bill still faces an uphill battle as senators now begin discussion on amendments with just a few days until they are supposed to break for two weeks.

If senators postpone talks for the two-week recess, the aid package will likely get sidelined as budget negotiations take the front seat, given looming government shutdown deadlines on March 1 and March 8.

The $95 billion bill was a stripped-down version of the Senate’s $118 billion bipartisan funding package, which was released on Sunday. 

The initial, more expensive bill failed Wednesday in a 49-50 vote after days of Republican opposition to the border security provisions. 

Anticipating that the first vote would fail, Schumer devised a plan to force a vote on the new $95 billion version of the bill, this time subtracting the disputed border security elements.

“For all those Republicans who first said, ‘We want it with border,’ and now say, ‘We want it without border,’ they got both options,” Schumer said Wednesday morning.

The success of Thursday’s vote is a hopeful next step for an issue that has been a point of paralysis for budget negotiations in the past.

Ukraine aid was the centerpiece of a particularly dramatic saga in September. House Republican hardliners tanked a budget deal in opposition to $6 billion…