MITCH ON THE ROPES AFTER BORDER DEAL COLLAPSE The Daily Caller published a major exclusive report on the possibility of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's ouster in the wake of the border deal blow-up Wednesday. Several prominent GOP senators, including Ted Cruz, Mike Lee and Ron Johnson, gamed out for the Caller how they could wrest control from McConnell at a vulnerable point in his career. The Senate deal, which included $60 billion in aid for Ukraine, was shut down Wednesday afternoon after a motion to proceed failed 49-50. 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. “I think this is our opportunity to take him out, and we’re sort of working to figure out if that’s possible. I think that there’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem where I think you probably have the votes, but you need somebody to step forward and that person’s that unwilling to step forward unless you have the votes, it can’t just be a Mike and Ted and a sort of everybody who hates Mitch thing,” one Republican senator, who was granted anonymity to speak freely without worry of retaliation from leadership, told the Caller. “You obviously have to get kind of the middle of the conference. So that’s all being worked on behind the scenes. And I think, frankly, how this vote works out will help determine whether the conference, broadly speaking, is willing to go in that direction.” McConnell put Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Lankford in charge of border deal negotiations with Democrats and the Biden administration. Every Senate Republican the Caller spoke with laid the blame on McConnell, however, saying he was the one truly crafting the deal behind the scenes and used Lankford, who is not running for reelection, as a pawn to take the fall for what the lawmakers said is a gift to their opponents “Every single Democrat candidate in the country running for Senate, running for House will use the identical 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 continued. “Now, that is a wild-eyed lie. It is completely false. This bill would have made the border crisis worse.” | 
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