Has Mitch McConnell Finally Broken The Senate GOP Caucus?
I’m not overly convicted about this. It’s just a theory. But I’ve now seen two pretty prominent examples of Republican senators going absolutely off the reservation and skewering the leader of the GOP caucus, particularly over this atrocious surrender of a “border-security” bill in the past week, and it’s making me think that Mitch McConnell might finally be at the point where Senate Republicans are ready to move on from his leadership.
The first one was last week, at which there was a press conference featuring Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin), Rick Scott (R-Florida) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) who unloaded on the border bill – or at least, what aspects of it they’d been able to ascertain.
Here was Johnson…
And here was Cruz, in one of the most eye-popping takedowns of a party leader you’ll ever see…
That press conference last week was positively brutal. So much so that once it had shaken the ground under Capitol Hill, McConnell admitted that there wasn’t enough support to move the border bill.
You might have thought that was the end of all this, but over the weekend there were more rumblings that McConnell and his lackey James Lankford (R-Oklahoma) were continuing to demand that members of the GOP caucus get on board with a bill that would normalize as many as five thousand illegal border-crossers a day (the correct number for that category is zero, not five thousand), in return for $60 billion in military aid to Ukraine when our own munitions stocks are dangerously depleted.
That bill is absolutely dead on arrival in the House. Speaker Mike Johnson continues to loudly and publicly insist that it will never see the light of day in that body.
And Johnson has a far better grasp on public sentiment than does McConnell, which is hardly a surprise; McConnell has been the GOP caucus leader in the Senate since 2007, and that 17-year record of his has been an endless demonstration of deliberate ignorance of the party’s voters.
There is no argument for this bill. Current law provides the president all the tools he needs to block illegals from coming into the country and deporting those who do make it here. Donald Trump proved that during his four years in office; Trump turned that border into a rather peaceful, sleepy place where law and order, at least for the most part, reigned. It was Biden, through his deliberately trashing Trump’s border policies and inviting the Third World invasion we’re currently groaning under, who created the current iteration of our border mess.
And Biden, if he chose, could make it stop. End catch-and-release, bring back remain-in-Mexico for asylum-seekers, finish building Trump’s wall and start deporting the people who have already made it here but who have no viable claim for asylum.
Biden doesn’t want to do that, and he’s playing the same stupid game Democrats have played for decades on this issue: open the border and let hordes of unskilled Third World immigrants in who then become government dependents, then agree to close the border in exchange for an amnesty program which converts those illegal aliens (or their children) into, over time, citizens and Democrat voters.
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McConnell has been the Republican leader for the last 17 years and he continues to play that idiotic game.
The question is how much longer he can play it.
There isn’t any evidence that he’s killed off his majority within the GOP senate caucus. Remember, McConnell was elected over Scott by a 37-10 margin after the 2022 elections. That’s a very large margin, at least to start with; one can only assume he still has most of it. And Ron Johnson, Scott and Cruz have long been detractors of McConnell’s. Let’s not pretend that their statements are particularly new or that they would represent a growing dissatisfaction with McConnell.
But then again, Scott posted an op-ed at The Hill this morning which might have been even hotter than Cruz’ epic rant last week…
So why would anyone in Washington believe that Trump, the Republican majority in the House of Representatives and Senate conservatives should be totally cast out of the conversation about the alleged border bill?
The answer is simple. Trump and House and Senate conservatives represent the views and beliefs of Republican voters. Mitch McConnell and the Washington establishment don’t. They have undermined Republican voters for years, and the voters have said enough.
Unfortunately, these politicians, who are hell-bent on this deal, represent a Republican Party that exists only in Washington, where it’s dominated by political and economic insiders. In this world, yesterday’s insider Republicans cut secret deals with yesterday’s insider Democrats behind closed doors, then spring them on hard working Americans like they just did us a great favor, when they actually kicked us in the teeth.
That’s over. Yesterday’s Republicans have cut enough self-serving deals with today’s Democrats. It’s time to move ahead without them.
The “process” so far on the alleged border deal is no different than then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) saying we have to pass ObamaCare to know what is in it. We haven’t seen any text and the little that McConnell has told us is that this is a massive check for Ukraine, and no border security until we get a Republican president. Most Republicans and even some Democrats are for accountability in Ukraine spending and real border security. Neither are in this bill, according to McConnell.
Republicans want a secure border. When I talk to Floridians, they want the border to get fixed today because they see how dangerous it is. More than 8 million people have illegally entered the United States since President Biden took office. Among them are hundreds of terrorists. It’s a catastrophic failure that is a real and present danger to American families, businesses and our national security.
I can’t say Scott represents much in the way of a majority in the GOP senate caucus. I assume he represents the 10 senators who voted for him; I have no idea about the others.
But I will say that this is the loudest and most strident that I’ve ever seen McConnell’s detractors, and I wonder whether that might not reflect a quiet dissatisfaction among some of the people who have previously supported him.
Worth watching for, I guess. Especially in an election year when the GOP should, by all rights, retake the Senate majority in spite of its out-of-touch and decrepit leadership.
