Time might be up for Mitch McConnell. After helping to write the recent “immigration deal” in the Senate, which conservatives in both the upper and lower chambers immediately rejected, the longtime Senate leader of the GOP is standing on shaky ground.
Younger Republicans in the Senate believe that the Kentucky leader’s failure to deliver strong border security should be the final straw.
The Daily Caller writes:
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 is almost certainly in his last term in the Senate.
Last summer, the GOP leader appeared to have a neurological event in which he froze while standing at a podium.
NBC News reported, “Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell appeared to freeze again Wednesday, this time during a gaggle with reporters in Covington, Kentucky, stopping for more than 30 seconds after he was asked whether he would run for re-election.
McConnell, R-Ky., froze in July at a news conference on Capitol Hill, going silent for 19 seconds, before he was escorted away from the cameras. McConnell, 81, returned shortly afterward and continued his news conference, telling reporters, “I’m fine.”
When it became apparent that McConnell had frozen again Wednesday, an aide went up to him and asked, “Did you hear the question, senator?” McConnell continued to be unresponsive.
Once McConnell re-engaged, he responded briefly to another question about Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, a Republican; his aide needed to repeat the question to him. McConnell was then asked about former President Donald Trump, another question that had to be repeated. McConnell brushed off the question because he does not usually engage in Trump-related topics.”
He immediately then left. When asked about his condition, staff claimed he “momentarily felt lightheaded” and said no more.
McConnell, 81, is one of the most influential Republican senators in history. He is typically credited for “saving the Supreme Court” by conservatives after taking heat when he blocked Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court in 2016.
Senate Minority Leader Ted Cruz