Senate Republicans have elected Senator John Thune of South Dakota as their new Majority Leader.
According to our sources on Capitol Hill the first-round votes were, Thune: 23, John Cornyn of Texas: 15, conservative endorsed Senator Rick Scott of Florida: 13. In the next round with Scott out it was 29 for Thune and 24 for Cornyn, making Thune the new Republican Majority Leader.
Let’s stipulate that in the wake of Donald Trump’s landslide reelection almost anyone would be better than Mitch McConnell, who made no secret of his contempt for Trump’s MAGA Movement supporters and his opposition to Trump’s plans for “draining the swamp.”
But the operative words here are “almost anyone” and John Thune has his own record of opposition to President Trump.
As David Sivak of the Washington Examiner noted, Thune has a rocky past with Trump dating back to the 2020 election and Trump's post-election day challenges to the vote based on credible claims of vote fraud. The criticism prompted Trump to seek, unsuccessfully, a primary challenger in Thune’s 2022 reelection campaign. Later, Thune would oppose Trump’s third run for president, endorsing Tim Scott’s primary run instead.
And then there was this video making the rounds before the Senate GOP vote.
However, Sen. Thune, unlike Sen. Mitch McConnell, appeared to offer an olive branch to President Trump and his supporters. As Mr. Trump locked up the presidential nomination, Thune endorsed him and fundraised on his behalf.
In an opinion piece for FOX News Sen. Thune wrote, “we have a mandate to govern” and “…we must prepare the Senate to advance that agenda legislatively and ensure that the president-elect can hit the ground running with his appointees confirmed as soon as possible. The Senate Republican majority will work with President Trump to ensure the Senate calendar allows us to confirm his nominees and pass our shared agenda as quickly and as efficiently as possible.”
This is a stark contrast to McConnell’s attitude after President Trump’s 2016 election, when the GOP-controlled Senate sat on many of Trump’s key nominees for months and left the subcabinet positions that implement policy in the hands of anti-Trump career bureaucrats.
Senator Thune further wrote, “At the top of the list is cleaning up the mess left by the Biden-Harris-Schumer agenda, which was clearly repudiated by the American people. The Republican Congress must ensure President Trump has the necessary tools and support to enforce border security laws and to remove the violent criminals wreaking havoc in every state. The Biden-Harris administration caused the border crisis. We will end it.
“Next, to make America prosperous again, we must take a hatchet to the regulatory apparatus choking our economy, starting with the 1,000 Biden-Harris regulations that have already cost Americans nearly $2 trillion. Streamlining the bureaucratic machine is long overdue.”
Again, Sen. Thune’s conciliatory comments are in marked contrast to Mitch McConnell’s attitude toward the Trump agenda, when he went so far as to demand that Trump stop talking about “draining the swamp.”
Perhaps our good friend Charlie Kirk best summed up conservative concerns in the aftermath of the Senate leadership election.
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