GOP Sen. Lankford responds to House speaker calling border bill “dead on arrival”: “Are we going to just complain?”

Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), the lead GOP negotiator on the Senate’s bipartisan border security deal, responded Monday morning to Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) calling the bill text “even worse” than expected and “dead on arrival” in the House.

“Unfortunate that he would step out and be able to say that right away before obviously he had a chance to be able to read it … and to be able to go through it,” Lankford said to “Fox & Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade regarding Johnson’s statement.

The text of the border bill is 370 pages and was released Sunday night.

“Are we as Republicans going to have press conferences and complain the border’s bad and then intentionally leave it open?” Lankford continued. “Are we going to just complain about things, or are we going to actually address and change as many things as we can?”

“It’s amazing to me — if i go back two months ago and say we have the shot under a Democrat president to dramatically increase detention beds, deportation flights, lock down the border, to be able to change the asylum laws, to be able to accelerate the process, no one would have believed it,” Lankford added. “And now no one actually wants to be able to fix it and says, ‘I don’t want to even debate it, I don’t want to discuss it.’”