Sen. Ted Cruz is calling for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to resign from his position. Cruz criticizes McConnell’s strategy, describing it as “fatally flawed.” Other Republican senators also express dissatisfaction with McConnell’s approach, citing concerns about secret negotiations and exclusion from negotiations on key issues, particularly related to border security.
BREAKING: Texas Sen. Ted Cruz calls for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to step down.
Cruz said when asked if it’s necessary for McConnell to step down as Senate leader, “I think it is.”
Other Republican senators have had enough of McConnell as well.
Sen. Ron Johnson… pic.twitter.com/LNJ1RBAYEZ
— Leading Report (@LeadingReport) February 7, 2024
End of the road for Cocaine Mitch.
Mitch McConnell has to be finished as the caucus leader for the Republicans in the Senate. Now. He has to resign, and if he won’t, then that caucus needs to get together and force him out.
Now. Not next week, not next month, not after this election cycle. Now.
McConnell gave a speech Monday demanding a “yes” vote on that atrocious border bill that Melissa Mackenzie and I both wrote about here at The American Spectator on Tuesday and discuss in the next episode of The Spectacle podcast. By now you already know how utterly awful a bill it was. And after McConnell blathered on for a while about what a good bill it was, the public outrage over the bill was so white-hot that three hours later McConnell relented:
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell recommended that Republicans vote against the $118 billion border security bill, at least for now. Even Oklahoma Senator Jim Lankford, one of the bill’s authors, indicated that it was too soon to bring the bill to a vote. The sudden about-face on the part of the GOP caucus left Democrat Brian Shatz saying on X, “Just gobsmacked. I’ve never seen anything like it. They literally demanded specific policy, got it, and then killed it.”
The cloture vote scheduled for Wednesday is certain to fail. Without the momentum of its much-anticipated release and the tactical advantage of not giving anyone time to read it, it seems that if the bill does pass, it is unlikely to resemble the atrocity unveiled Sunday night.
I quoted this from Ace of Spades in the open to The Spectacle episode, and I think it bears repeating here:
McConnell’s determination to ram through yet another Comprehensive Amnesty will have several terrible aftereffects.
On the strictly political side, it gives Biden and Schumer what they actually wanted all along: A way to blame Republicans for the Democrats’ border catastrophe. Democrats will claim the solution to the open border crisis was at hand, but Republicans rejected it for political reasons.
Indeed, turncoat “Republican” liberal James Lankford is going out on all the political talk shows making exactly that case.
On the policy side, Democrats will now insist that this weak “deal” establish the contours of any future “deal.” In other words: The Republicans have announced that they seek only the tiniest breadcrumbs in exchange for mass amnesty; why would Democrats ever agree to offer more than breadcrumbs in any “deal”? McConnell has committed us, out to the medium future, to sharing the Democrats’ Amnesty First, Security Last (or Never) agenda.
The “deal,” by the way, contained a Very Special Betrayal for conservatives: The bill would make the ultra-liberal DC Circuit Court the only court empowered to decide questions about immigration and border enforcement. We’ve seen some good rulings coming out of the Fifth Circuit on the border; this “deal” would take all cases away from any conservative-tilted court and give them all to the leftwing DC circuit.
This is a “deal.” You guys are excited by this “deal,” right?
Ace has it exactly right.
What McConnell has done in taking an issue that had gone absolutely, utterly septic for the Democrat Party — an issue that held the promise to ruin Democrats in all federal (and quite a few state) elections this fall — and offer a Solyndra-style bailout in the form of that border bill has been to utterly and completely neutralize the issue.