Hardline Senate Republicans are trying to throw a wrench into their party’s plans after a bruising night at the polls.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) is collecting signatures for a letter urging GOP leaders to call a conference meeting before Senate Republicans hold their closed-door leadership election, which is still expected to happen as planned on Tuesday, Politico reported Thursday.
Johnson made the case for slowing things down during an appearance on The Clay & Buck Show, arguing his colleagues should first take stock of where things went wrong.
“We need to delay that. We need a robust discussion — I always call them a postmortem — of what happened. You just can’t, ‘Oh, let’s elect this leadership team by acclimation.’ That’s unacceptable,” Johnson said.
Senate GOP rules allow five Republican senators to force a special conference meeting by putting a formal request in writing. Johnson already has at least one backer in Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), a frequent ally who said on social media that he would add his name to the letter.
“We have no business holding Senate Republican leadership elections until: (1) we’ve had ample opportunity to discuss what happened on Tuesday, and (2) we know who’s going to be in our conference,” Lee wrote.
This isn’t the first time Johnson has leaned on the conference’s rules to force all of his GOP colleagues into the same room. Senate Republicans also shot down a similar effort in 2022 to push back their leadership vote.
The latest push faces long odds. Republican senators and aides told Politico Thursday they don’t currently expect the election to slip past Tuesday, and the party could technically squeeze a conference meeting onto the calendar before the vote takes place.
Johnson himself admitted the effort was an uphill battle.
“I don’t know that I’ll be able to stop this vote,” he said.
The fight comes as Senate Majority Leader John Thune seeks a second term atop the conference, a job that would see him leading Republicans in the minority starting in January.
No GOP senator has publicly said they’ll vote against Thune, and nobody has stepped forward to challenge him. Republicans broadly expect him to hold on to the post.
Even Johnson seemed resigned to that outcome. When asked whether Thune would face a challenger, Johnson replied, “Who would want the job?”
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