Senate Republicans will not choose their new leader until a secret ballot on Wednesday at 9:30 a.m., but the candidates will each make their case to the entire conference during a closed-door forum Tuesday night.
Hosted by Steering Committee Chairman Mike Lee (R-UT) at 6 p.m. in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Room of the United States Capitol, the forum will allow the candidates to make their case directly to their Senate colleagues, and it will allow other senators to explain to the conference who they are voting for and why.
As host of the forum, Lee will not be endorsing a candidate, but he does know what he wants to hear from each candidate.
“We have an unprecedented opportunity to reform the Senate and actually weigh our options for the next majority leader,” Lee told the Washington Examiner. “We cannot afford to coronate someone who will push massive spending bills at the end of every year while sabotaging Donald Trump’s policy agenda. This forum gives the candidates a chance to convince us that they’ll run things better than the old guard.”
Sens. John Thune (R-SD), John Cornyn (R-TX), and Rick Scott (R-FL) are the three candidates running for majority leader. Thune is the favorite as he holds the majority whip post, a position Cornyn held for six years before he was term-limited out. Scott has never served in a formal Senate leadership role, but he did chair the National Republican Senatorial Committee for the 2022 midterm cycle.
Lee and many other Republicans have become frustrated with how Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) ran the Senate in conjunction with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). Both McConnell and Schumer, as well as former Democratic Sen. Harry Reid before them, often employed a tactic called “filling the tree” that made it impossible for any senator from either party even to offer, let alone debate or vote on, an amendment to legislation.
McConnell would instead work with Democrats behind closed doors on a legislative deal that would then be presented to both parties as a take-it-or-leave-it bill. Those not invited into closed-door negotiations by McConnell and Schumer would, therefore, have no input on legislation.
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At first, this was a practice employed occasionally by Reid and McConnell, but in recent years, it has become how they do almost all business in the Senate. And a silent majority of senators from both parties are tired of it.
The question heading into Tuesday night’s forum is who can assure most senators that they can be trusted to return the power of speech and debate to the rank-and-file members of the world’s greatest deliberative body.