Senate GOP Meetings Devolving Into 'Shouting Matches': It's a 'Complete Mess'
An article Wednesday morning said that, behind closed doors, Senate Republicans have been engaged in meetings that have become little more than “shouting matches.”
John Bresnahan and Jake Sherman, writing for Punchbowl News, called the situation “a complete mess.”
In a post to X in which he shared a link to the article, Sherman compared the Senate to the House Republican conference.
“The Senate GOP is beginning to look like their colleagues on the House side,” he wrote in the post. “Their meetings are devolving into shouting matches. There’s sniping at the leadership, accusation hurling, motivation questioning.”
According to Sherman, the dual issues causing the disunity were border security and military aid to Ukraine in its war with Russia.
☀️INSIDE THE SPLINTERING SENATE GOP
The Senate GOP is beginning to look like their colleagues on the House side.
Their meetings are devolving into shouting matches. There’s sniping at the leadership, accusation hurling, motivation questioning.
This all centers on…
— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) January 24, 2024
A lunch held Tuesday for policy discussions “devolved into testy exchanges over immigration, Donald Trump and Ukraine,” similar to other private meetings among Republicans, the two reported.
Some Republican senators are questioning whether McConnell is ignoring their concerns and siding with Democrats to push through more money for Ukraine, a significant policy concern of the Kentucky Republican.
At the lunch, McConnell said further conversation about Ukraine funding wasn’t necessary, according to the report, because that discussion has already been going on for months.
Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, however, called for another meeting — scheduled for Wednesday afternoon — because, he argued that wasn’t true and Republicans “haven’t really talked about this at all,” according to the article.
After Republicans’ poor showing in the 2022 midterm elections, when the party that doesn’t hold the presidency typically picks up seats, some called for a change in leadership, but McConnell fought that challenge off.
Calls for a change resurfaced when McConnell, now 81, faced “repeated health problems” in 2023, Bresnahan and Sherman noted, but died down again as his health “improved markedly.”
As former President Donald Trump increasingly looks like the 2024 Republican presidential nominee, McConnell’s problems are only likely to grow, as there is no love lost between the two men.
Trump suggested that Republicans replace McConnell as majority leader after he stated publicly that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election, the article noted. As Trump’s power in the party grows, as looks likely this year, McConnell is likely to face additional challenges.
And as for border security, Senate Republicans are still without a proposal to bring to the floor.
“Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) briefed his fellow Republicans on the status of the bipartisan talks over immigration and border security he’s holding with Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.),” the article said.
No bill will be ready for review this week, said Lankford — who Bresnahan and Sherman described as being “testy” at the lunch — but some proposed language may be available soon.
Some Republicans are growing concerned that border security — “the biggest political issue in the country, according to recent polls” — could wind up being a win for Democrats this fall if they propose a solution and Republicans spurn them. That, the writers noted, could put Biden in the position of being able to say that he’d made a proposal but Republicans wouldn’t work with him.
“This is what Senate Republican leaders have been warning privately for weeks, especially to those GOP lawmakers up for reelection in 2024,” Bresnahan and Sherman wrote.
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