Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell’s days leading the Republican minority could be numbered following the collapse of Senate leadership’s bipartisan national security supplemental aid bill this week. Several prominent Republican senators expressed that the border bill debacle could push the GOP conference over the edge to remove McConnell from leadership, they told the Daily Caller in exclusive conversations Wednesday.
“Mitch McConnell, in effect, gave the largest in-kind campaign contribution to the Democrats’ Senate campaign committee in history,” Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz told the Caller.
Conservatives both inside the official Republican Party apparatus and out have long criticized McConnell, an institution in the Senate with a reputation for shrewd negotiation and savvy maneuvering, for not taking sufficiently hardline stances on key issues to the party’s base. McConnell has continued to keep a stranglehold on power in the Republican conference for nearly two decades, but momentum to remove him has reached a fevered pitch after a tidal wave of backlash to the border policy proposal unveiled this week.
