.ON DECEMBER 6TH Republicans turned down Head of state Joe Biden's ask for $106bn of financing, a lot of it to help arm Ukraine, on the basis that its own arrangements to get United States's southern border carried out not progress good enough. A team of senators currently seem to be near to hitting a bipartisan offer on immigration policies, thought to feature more durable plans as the price of Republican help. But it looks probably to become defeated in our home of Reps. On January 14th Mike Johnson, our home speaker, claimed that meaningful boundary reform would have to hang around till a Republican was head of state. Yet on January 17th, after an appointment with Mr Biden, he suggested that he could be ready for a trade-off after all. Is one probably?