Senate Republicans are considering a move to remove Minority Leader Mitch McConnell due to disagreements over his leadership and handling of a spending bill.
Several Republican senators, including Ted Cruz, have criticized McConnell for his support of a spending bill backed by Democrats and the White House, which they view as a betrayal of conservative principles.
McConnell’s failure to push for hardline measures and his handling of negotiations with Democrats have further fueled dissent among conservative senators.
“Mitch McConnell, in effect, gave the largest in-kind campaign contribution to the Democrats’ Senate campaign committee in history,” Sen. Ted Cruz said.
“I think this is our opportunity to take him out, and we’re sort of working to figure out if that’s possible. I think that there’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem where I think you probably have the votes, but you need somebody to step forward and that person’s that unwilling to step forward unless you have the votes, it can’t just be a Mike and Ted and a sort of everybody who hates Mitch thing,” a Republican senator said.
“You obviously have to get kind of the middle of the conference. So that’s all being worked on behind the scenes. And I think, frankly, how this vote works out will help determine whether the conference, broadly speaking, is willing to go in that direction,” he said.
“Every single Democrat candidate in the country running for Senate, running for House will use the identical talking points — they will all say: We wanted to secure the border. We tried to secure the border, but the Republicans wouldn’t let us,” Cruz said. “Now, that is a wild-eyed lie. It is completely false. This bill would have made the border crisis worse.”
However, other Senate Republican leaders have stood by McConnell, indicating that the dissenting group still has a way to go in finding an alternative leader who could garner majority support.
“As long as I’ve been serving in the Senate, there’s never been an issue where the American public is so overwhelmingly in support of our position, which is to secure the border. So how can you take as leader, how do you take an issue where the American people support us and lead us into a box, where now, when a bill is produced, it is worse than doing nothing,” Sen. Ron Johnson said. “When that’s rejected, we get blamed. I mean, you got to work overtime to screw that up.”
“I’ve even heard privately, Democratic colleagues, tell me ‘your leadership was desperate to make a deal, that it made us less willing to negotiate’. So this is an open secret that these guys were not driving a hard bargain and you see the results in the border package that came out,” J.D. Vance said. “And now we’re seeing the second step of the process, which is kill the border package. Jam through the Ukraine package. It doesn’t make any sense.”
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