OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell has led Republicans in the upper chamber for going on two decades, but his time in the party’s leadership may soon come to an end.
A growing number of Senate Republicans are looking to oust him as minority leader after they accused him of back-dooring them and their constituents over the recently failed ‘border’ bill they claim was light on combatting waves of migrants crossing illegally into the U.S. and very heavy on providing tens of billions more U.S. tax dollars for Ukraine and other countries.
“Mitch McConnell, in effect, gave the largest in-kind campaign contribution to the Democrats’ Senate campaign committee in history,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told The Daily Caller after he and most other Senate Republicans defected from the legislation.
“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.”
Despite McConnell’s familiarity with Senate maneuvers and procedures, he has long been outside the Republican base on issues that are important to them—illegal immigration and border security foremost among them.
“I think this is our opportunity to take him out, and we’re sort of working to figure out if that’s possible,” according to one Republican senator, granted anonymity by The Daily Caller.
“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, R-Wis., said. “When that’s rejected, we get blamed. I mean, you got to work overtime to screw that up.”
Every senator who spoke with The Daily Caller said that McConnell, not Sen. James Lankford, R-Oklahoma, whom McConnell assigned to lead the negotiations, was the one who struck the deal with the Democrats.
Since Lankford is not seeking reelection, he was considered the best option in the event that the bill failed, which happened.
“We have an invasion at our border and some in Congress are more concerned with securing Ukraine’s border. I’m doing everything I can to slow down and stop this horrible spending bill,” Republican Rand Paul, Kentucky’s other senator, added.
During a recent rally in South Carolina ahead of that state’s GOP primaries, former President Donald Trump, whose border policies were credited with the lowest rates of illegal crossings by the time he left office, brought a rally crowd to its feet when he said, “We now have the worst border in the world.”
“TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP!” the crowd responded.
“ALL A PRESIDENT HAS TO DO IS SAY, “CLOSE THE BORDER,” AND THE BORDER WILL BE CLOSED. A COSTLY NEW BILL IS NOT NECESSARY!” he added on his Truth Social platform while also bragging that his allies in the Senate and among voters helped kill McConnell’s legislation.
“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,'” JD Vance, R-Ohio, told The Daily Caller. “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. 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 proposed $118 border security bill, which included $60 billion in additional funding for Ukraine, went down by a 49-50 margin.
When asked at a press conference Tuesday if it was time for McConnell to go, Cruz responded, “I think it is.”
McConnell is blaming Republican senators for the development and subsequent failure of the pro-migration bill that he secretly drafted with Democrat leaders.
“The reason we’ve been talking about the border is because they [GOP Senators] wanted to,” he told Politico, adding, “The reason we ended up where we are is the members decided, since it was never going to become law, they didn’t want to deal with it … I don’t know who is at fault here, in terms of trying to cast public blame.”
