It may have been overdue, but Senate Republicans are finally getting a taste of the nasty infighting that has plagued their colleagues in the House for the past year.
On Wednesday, Senate Republicans mercifully killed off a bill they had negotiated with Senate Democrats that would have provided foreign aid funding to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan in exchange for some border security measures. A mere four Republican senators ended up voting for the bill.
It was a stunning change of course for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who had tasked Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) with negotiating the bill, but 24 hours after the bill text was released, McConnell said senators should oppose it.
For McConnell, this failure is the starkest evidence yet that the octogenarian senator from Kentucky is losing his hold on the Senate Republican conference, as the infighting that has consumed the party in the House of Representatives has now bled over to the Senate side.
The entire reason that border security and foreign aid were tied together was because a majority of the Republican conference did not want to hand out another blank check to Ukraine without addressing the enormous crisis engulfing the southern border. It was an entirely reasonable proposition, and given growing anxiety among Democrats over the issue, one where significant concessions could reasonably be expected.
But McConnell, in as many words, admitted this week that he really just wanted to pass Ukraine funding and that the border provisions were merely a means to that end. In other words, the leader of the Senate Republicans was out of step with the very people he is supposed to be leading.
“I’ve had a small group of persistent critics the whole time I’ve been in this job,” he reportedly said. “They had their shot. … The reason we’ve been talking about the border is because they wanted to.”
The bill negotiations were supposed to be an opportunity for the party to project unity. Instead, McConnell and Lankford failed to enter the negotiation with a sense of what was acceptable to the conference and what wasn’t, thereby pushing the party’s disunity back into the limelight.
While talking to Republican senators on Wednesday amid the chaos, the sense I got is that the Republican conference is functionally leaderless. As a body, it may have a leader in name, but there are deep tactical and ideological divisions that are being forced out in the open in a way that has not been the case before.
Several senators I spoke to demurred or laughed when I asked if McConnell was really in charge of the Republican Senate conference, but while others offered a forceful defense of their leader, the inconsistency betrayed a party at war with itself and a leadership incapable of uniting it.
For all of McConnell’s time in the Senate and nearly 20 years as leader, at a certain point, he is going to have to come to terms with the fact that the Republican Party of the 2000s is not the Republican Party of 2024 and that he is largely out of touch with the party’s base. As much as he may loathe it, his critics like Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO), Ron Johnson (R-WI), Mike Lee (R-UT), and J.D. Vance (R-OH) are far more representative of the party and its base than he is.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
As the Republican Party stares down a general election in November that could very well bring Donald Trump back to the White House and offers the party the best chance to retake the Senate for the next six years, the leadership of the party in Congress is going to be increasingly under the microscope. Pending the results of the election up and down the ballot, some major changes could be in the offing.
It is no secret that Trump and McConnell have an extremely frosty relationship. And if the former president is ultimately successful in his bid to retake the White House in November, it will likely spell the end of McConnell’s time as leader. Until then, the Senate GOP will remain functionally leaderless.