There are two ways you could look at what happened on Capitol Hill this week, when Republicans voted down the hard-right border deal attached to the White House’s military aid package for Ukraine and Israel.

One is the way that most of the mainstream press, Democrats in Congress, and liberal commentariat have chosen to talk about it: as a textbook case of GOP irresponsibility and inability to govern. To be fair, there’s certainly something to the absurdity of Republicans demanding that harsh border measures be put into the aid package as a condition of voting for it, getting exactly what they wanted, then immediately refusing to vote for it anyway because Donald Trump told them not to give the president a win.

But there’s also another, more depressing way to look at it: as a major victory for Republicans and immigration restrictionists more broadly, engineering a hard rightward lurch on the border by both Democrats and the liberal press, who have adopted not just the policies but the rhetoric of what for eight years they’ve been calling incipient fascism and white supremacy. If this holds, it will be a far bigger prize than any one single bill — and a much bigger deal than the usual Republican hypocrisy in Congress.