The spirit is willing, but the GOP is weak.
Henry Rodgers for the Daily Caller:
Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell's days leading the Republican minority could be numbered following the collapse of Senate leadership's bipartisan national security supplemental aid bill this week. Several prominent Republican senators expressed that the border bill debacle could push the GOP conference over the edge to remove McConnell from leadership, they told the Daily Caller in exclusive conversations Wednesday.
"Mitch McConnell, in effect, gave the largest in-kind campaign contribution to the Democrats' Senate campaign committee in history," Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz told the Caller.
Conservatives both inside the official Republican Party apparatus and out have long criticized McConnell, an institution in the Senate with a reputation for shrewd negotiation and savvy maneuvering, for not taking sufficiently hardline stances on key issues to the party's base. McConnell has continued to keep a stranglehold on power in the Republican conference for nearly two decades, but momentum to remove him has reached a fevered pitch after a tidal wave of backlash to the border policy proposal unveiled this week.
"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," one Republican senator, who was granted anonymity to speak freely without worry of retaliation from leadership, told the Caller. "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."
McConnell put Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Lankford in charge of border deal negotiations with Democrats and the Biden administration. Every Senate Republican the Caller spoke with laid the blame on McConnell, however, saying he was the one truly crafting the deal behind the scenes and used Lankford, who is not running for reelection, as a pawn to take the fall for what the lawmakers said is a gift to their opponents.
"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. "Now, that is a wild-eyed lie. It is completely false. This bill would have made the border crisis worse."
"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," Republican Wisconsin 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," Republican Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance told the Daily Caller. "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."
The Senate deal, which included $60 billion in aid for Ukraine, was shut down Wednesday afternoon after a motion to proceed failed 49-50. Maine Sen. Susan Collins, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Utah Sen. Mitt Romney and Lankford were the only GOP Senators who voted to pass the legislation. Meanwhile, several Democrats also opposed the deal, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez and Massachusetts Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer then put a package on the floor to ship aid to Ukraine and Israel, with no provisions for border security.
Meanwhile, the predictions of Cruz and others came true before the body of the deal was even cold Wednesday. This week, President Joe Biden blamed Republicans for the crisis at the southern border, stating that their inability to pass legislation to solve the problem was going to be used against them every day on the campaign trail between now and November. Other Democrats have begun deploying the same line.
Republican hopes of using Ukraine aid to secure a big win on perhaps 2024's biggest issue, the border, went up in flames.
More at the link.
There are Senators who genuinely want to oust McConnell, but there are many liberal fake Republicans who want to keep him because McConnell is great at scheming at how to advance the Democrat Party's agenda while pretending to be Republicans, and then there are a bunch of cowards and grifters who are afraid to do anything and just want to know that Mitch McConnell's corporate money will keep flowing to them.