FLASH: McConnell moves up leadership vote to get himself reelected Senate Minority Leader. Scott gets 10 votes in opposition to McConnell.
The process of electing new Republican leaders in the United States Senate and House of Representatives is moving rapidly toward elections, with Senate Minority Leader Mitch
McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy both seeking to continue leading the GOP on the Hill.
From our perspective the reelection of McConnell and McCarthy would be a disaster for the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
And the reasons go far beyond their lack of communications skills, terrible staff choices and ineffectiveness in opposing the Democrats’ Far Left agenda for the past two years.
As our friend Frank Gaffney explained in one of his must-listen Secure Freedom Minutes:
Two federal legislators have courageously offered their Republican colleagues an actual choice of leadership in the House and Senate. Representative Andy Biggs and Senator Rick Scott rose to challenge those deemed unassailably entitled to be the GOP’s bosses in their respective chambers. They deserve our thanks – and support.
Representative Kevin McCarthy’s lack of integrity and personal misconduct prompted him once before to withdraw in ignominy from a bid for House Speaker. His refusal to articulate a compelling policy agenda and fund some Republican nominees contributed to his party’s tiny majority this time around.
Similar disqualifying traits apply to Senator Mitch McConnell and helped preclude the GOP’s victory in his chamber. Worse yet, he’s deeply compromised by the Chinese Communist Party.
A handful of Republicans can deny McCarthy the Speakership in January. A majority of them in the Senate should reject McConnell.
Mr. Gaffney is quite correct in his analysis, but, given that it had to be stated in one short minute, it didn’t go nearly far enough in describing the damage McConnell and McCarthy have done to the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
Between the two of them they have managed to alienate the activist base of the Republican Party, leaving it a hollowed-out shell bereft of voters and grassroots donors.
And as much as they don’t like Donald Trump it is their failures, their lack of leadership and their failed agenda of being “dime store Democrats” that created the MAGA movement and the political vacuum that Donald Trump identified and occupied in 2015.
In McConnell’s case this was by design. His antipathy for grassroots conservatives is well-known and he’s never been shy about saying he would “crush” conservative movement candidates, as he famously said was his intention toward Tea Party-backed candidates running in 2010 and 2012.
In Kevin McCarthy’s case we’re not sure whether it has been by ideological design, or whether it is a symptom of McCarthy’s tendency to tell people what they want to hear and be liked by everybody.
Neither trait is a good one in a leader, and the result is that McCarthy’s many promises to conservatives have gone unfulfilled, making him look like a liar or an idiot, take your pick.
In contrast to the perfidious and content-free McConnell and McCarthy, Senator Rick Scott of Florida, and Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona are men of their word, who have shown a commitment to legislating, and building a Republican Party, based on conservative principles.
And they are fighters who can actually articulate coherent arguments for conservative principles and policy and are not afraid to go on TV and do so.
The Senate leadership election will be conducted as early as today and the election of the new Speaker of the House is a two-step process, in which Kevin McCarthy has already prevailed in the first step.
Is it possible to have a political party without voters at the grassroots? We’re about to find out if McConnell and McCarthy are elected to lead Republicans on Capitol Hill.
We urge CHQ readers and friends to call Republican Senators and Representatives. Tell them we need conservative leaders on Capitol Hill, like Senator Rick Scott and Rep. Andy Biggs, to replace the failed non-leadership of Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy.
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