Several Republican senators are reportedly looking into removing Mitch McConnell as GOP Senate leader on the tail of the disastrous border bill that he helped negotiate with the Democrat Party.
The 81-year-old senator from Kentucky, who was first elected to the upper chamber in 1985 and has been the leader of the Senate Republican Caucus since 2007, worked hard behind the scenes for the horrid amnesty-laden border bill that Republicans in the House of Representatives said is “dead on arrival.”
In fact, Democrat Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York was full of praise for McConnell for working so closely with him on the border bill that would allow millions more illegals to stream across the border and would act like an even louder siren call to lure them here.
The bill was so bad, though, that McConnell — who has long been an amnesty supporter — even turned against the bill himself, saying that there was “no real chance” that the bill could pass, and urged his caucus not to vote in favor of the first vote to proceed.
But the fact that he was instrumental in writing the bill in close cooperation with the Democrats is a black mark on his name, at least as far as other GOP senators, including Ted Cruz, J.D. Vance and Ron Johnson, are concerned. Consequently, some senators are openly talking about voting to oust McConnell as their GOP leader in the U.S. Senate.
Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz blasted McConnell for his part in pushing the border bill, telling the Daily Callerthat McConnell may as well been working for the Democrats.
“Mitch McConnell, in effect, gave the largest in-kind campaign contribution to the Democrats’ Senate campaign committee in history,” Cruz said.
Another senator, who wanted to remain anonymous, told the Daily Caller that this could be the cue to “take him out” of leadership.
“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,” the unnamed senator 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 continued, bashing McConnell’s border bill. “Now, that is a wild-eyed lie. It is completely false. This bill would have made the border crisis worse.”
Wisconsin Republican Ron Johnson was also incredulous over McConnell’s failure.
“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,” Johnson said. “When that’s rejected, we get blamed. I mean, you got to work overtime to screw that up.”
Ohio Republican J.D. Vance told the Daily Caller he was astonished over McConnell’s border bill debacle.
“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,” 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,” Vance added.
Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott also blasted McConnell for the abject failure.
“The entire reason, in my opinion, on why we were doing this,” he said of the original purpose of the bill, “was we actually wanted to get real border security, not an immigration bill. So what we ended up with was an immigration bill with no border security. And now what they want to do is say, ‘well, we tried.’ No, you didn’t.”
The GOP natives are restless, for sure. This massive failure, coupled with McConnell’s recent health scares, might signal the end of the era for his command of GOP leadership in the U.S. Senate.
McConnell did yeoman’s work by using every Senate rule possible to quickly confirm Donald Trump’s judicial appointees. For that, we must thank him, as that was an important service to the nation. But his establishment-mired, amnesty-supporting ideas have been long out of vogue with the Republican base and it is time for the GOP to choose someone who represents what Republicans really want. And Mitch McConnell isn’t what GOP voters want.
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