The Senate will resume session on Tuesday. New members will also appear. A candidate forum will be held Tuesday night where the men vying for Senate Republican leadership will make their case, and on Wednesday Republican senators and the next senators of the 119th Congress will choose their next leadership.
It's important work. Under Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), power and funding have become increasingly centralized, while the Senate's normal mandates have been sidelined, and with it the Senate committees that seriously shape policy. The authority of the committee chairman was also weakened.
Support can be fickle within the Senate…how much does ideology play a role?
And while the House of Representatives plays a key role in governing, and its members are generally louder and more conservative than their Senate counterparts, we can expect all that to calm down in the next Congress. It's business time when the same party controls both houses of Congress and the presidency, and the House tends to follow the Senate's lead without any of the drama of the past four years. So the Senate majority leader? important role.
The three candidates are Sen. John Thune (South Dakota), Sen. John Cornyn (Texas), and Sen. Rick Scott (Florida). Two men with strong leadership histories who are moderates, and a bashing billionaire known for pissing off McConnell and shaking things up. While the Republican base may be the favorite in these types of races, the Senate is an entirely different animal.
Although D.C. has maintained for months that Thune was the leader, Cornyn could be, and Scott was a conservative protest movement aimed at extracting concessions from the eventual leader, Team Tune There isn't much to support this, other than an aggressive behind-the-scenes campaign by Makes me think so.
To be sure, Thun and Cornyn fit that mold. Both had long had close ties to the leadership (and less close ties to conservatives). Cornyn, in particular, has built a huge fundraising organization that generously supports his colleagues (which is important in closed popularity contests). Although Thune didn't have a lot of luck, he actively campaigned for his fellow Republicans throughout the last election. Mr. Scott has largely gotten his own way, but in recent years he has aggressively challenged Mr. McConnell's very non-MAGA agenda and proposed actual (but unpopular with his colleagues) agenda for Republicans to implement. He stood out with his attitude. .
But since this is a secret ballot, no one actually knows who is responsible for what. As retired Sen. Lamar Alexander quipped in his December 2020 farewell address, in 2006, “When I lost the race for the Republican nomination by one vote, I lost 27 votes to 24. I wrote a letter of appreciation for the
Secret voting can be important. This allows senators to avoid retaliation for opposing the eventual winner. It could also protect them from the influence of President-elect Donald J. Trump. So far, President Trump has refused to get involved in the campaign, but it would be in his interest to have a Senate majority leader who could work with him for once. Members of the same camp know this, and leaks and abuses are flying around on Capitol Hill that undermine this or that candidate.
For example, a video that began filming between staff and members this week shows five clips of Thune badmouthing Trump, followed by a video earlier in the week in which the senator told Trump not to try to influence the election. A clip warning him followed, ending with a tweet. Donald Trump Jr. attacked both Thune and Cornyn as establishment liberals.
And last week's Axios article reported that President Trump had dismissed Scott as an unserious candidate months earlier. President Trump's press secretary denied it, but the point is, there is blood. And if Trump has no influence on the election, why does Mr. Thune feel the need to warn him? If he was comfortable with the support of the greats, or if he was sure that it would not affect him, he would have invited it. (That said, he has courted former and future presidents and is in frequent contact with Scott and Cornyn.)
Within the Senate, support can be fickle. Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma joined Mr. Thune's South Dakota colleague Mike Rounds in endorsing him, while populist conservative Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri on Friday announced his support for Mr. Cornyn's candidacy. expressed. why? Mr. Cornyn appeared committed to supporting Mr. Hawley's mission to pass legislation in the Senate that would cover radiation exposure from federal causes for people in all 50 states. Earlier this year, other fiscal interests proposed expanding the bill to include Missouri, but Hawley wanted it to cover all 50 states. Scott voted against it. end.
And how much does ideology have to do with it? Mr. Cornyn has taken several positions throughout his life, including on the now unpopular criminal justice reform. Do conservatives want a strong chairman who doesn't share their views, or do they want someone who can adapt to the current mandate (a mandate that Trump clearly won)? Republican senators won all but two states, and Trump won by tens to hundreds of thousands of votes.
And Cornyn is courting conservatives who would otherwise be expected to vote for Scott. The day after Trump's election, he issued a statement pledging to return to normal order in the Senate, including empowering committees. Those two things are far more important to empowering the legislature than term limits for leaders (although Trump supports them as well). Another point in his favor? He has his own fundraising team and doesn't rely on McConnell's people like Thune does.
Scott is the only one of them to have put pen to paper and written a plan for what Senate Republicans should fight for. That courage has been in short supply for the past five years in Washington, D.C., but will it make a difference now that Trump is back and his policies are: of agenda?
All of this and more will be worked out in behind-the-scenes negotiations this week, but as is fashionable, McConnell's team didn't want even that to happen. He is scheduled to receive a lifetime achievement award from the staunchly anti-MAGA American Enterprise Institute on Tuesday night, but Utah Sen. Mike Lee's candidate forum is disrupting the celebration. It's really perfect.
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