OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Senate Minority Leader and Republican Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell is stepping down from his position.
The senator is expected to announce his decision on Wednesday in the Senate chambers, The Associated Press reported.
“One of life’s most underappreciated talents is to know when it’s time to move on to life’s next chapter,” the 82-year-old senator will say, as obtained by The Associated Press. “So I stand before you today … to say that this will be my last term as Republican leader of the Senate.”
“His decision punctuates a powerful ideological transition underway in the Republican Party, from Ronald Reagan’s brand of traditional conservatism and strong international alliances to the fiery, often isolationist populism of former President Donald Trump,” The Associated Press said.
This month, several influential Senate Republicans spoke to The Daily Caller about their doubts that McConnell was the best person to steer the party’s goals in the wake of the recent border bill fiasco.
“Mitch McConnell, in effect, gave the largest in-kind campaign contribution to the Democrats’ Senate campaign committee in history,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told The Daily Caller.
“Every single Democrat candidate in the country running for Senate or House will use the same talking points—they will all say: We wanted to secure the border. We tried to secure the border, but the Republicans wouldn’t let us,” Cruz said. “Now, that is a wild-eyed lie. It is completely false. This bill would have made the border crisis worse.”
Despite McConnell’s familiarity with Senate maneuvers and procedures, he has long been outside the Republican base on issues that are important to them—illegal immigration and border security being foremost among them.
“I think this is our opportunity to take him out, and we’re sort of working to figure out if that’s possible,” according to one Republican senator, granted anonymity by The Daily Caller.
“As long as I’ve been serving in the Senate, there’s never been an issue where the American public is so overwhelmingly in support of our position, which is to secure the border.
“So how can you take — as leader — how do you take an issue where the American people support us and lead us into a box, where now, when a bill is produced, it is worse than doing nothing,” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said. “When that’s rejected, we get blamed. I mean, you got to work overtime to screw that up.”
Every senator who spoke with The Daily Caller said that McConnell, not Sen. James Lankford, R-Oklahoma, whom McConnell assigned to lead the negotiations, was the one who struck the deal with the Democrats.
Since Lankford is not seeking reelection, he was considered the best option if the bill failed, which it did.
“I’ve even heard privately, Democratic colleagues tell me, ‘Your leadership was desperate to make a deal, that it made us less willing to negotiate,'” JD Vance, R-Ohio, told The Daily Caller. “So this is an open secret that these guys were not driving a hard bargain, and you see the results in the border package that came out. And now we’re seeing the second step of the process, which is kill the border package. Jam through the Ukraine package. It doesn’t make any sense.”
The proposed $118 border security bill, which included $60 billion in additional funding for Ukraine, went down by a 49-50 margin.
When asked at a press conference Tuesday if it was time for McConnell to go, Cruz responded, “I think it is.”
McConnell is blaming Republican senators for the development and subsequent failure of the pro-migration bill he secretly drafted with Democratic leaders.
The Kentucky Republican made headlines last week when he announced that the sister of his wife, Elaine Chao, died in a recent car crash.
Chao, who served as the first Asian-American Secretary of Transportation under former President Donald Trump, stated that her family remembered her sister Angela Chao as a “brilliant woman, a charismatic and visionary leader.”
