It was nearly 16 years ago when Sen. Mitch McConnell first became the Senate Republican’s top leader. He ran unopposed. In every Congress since, the Kentucky senator has asked to remain in the position — sometimes as majority leader, other times as minority leader — and he’s never faced an intraparty rival.
That is, until this year. NBC News reported this afternoon:
Sen. Rick Scott announced a challenge to Sen. Mitch McConnell for the top Republican leadership job in the Senate during a meeting of the GOP members on Tuesday. A spokesman for Scott, of Florida, confirmed the announcement.
There is not yet a firm headcount as to who’s most likely to win this fight, though McConnell is almost certainly the favorite. That said, we won’t have to wait too long to learn who’s won: Senate Republicans are scheduled to meet tomorrow morning at 9:30 a.m. eastern for a closed-door, secret-ballot election. The winner will be decided by majority rule.
The news does not exactly come out of nowhere: Scott has spent much of the last two years picking surprisingly contentious fights with McConnell, despite the fact that they’re members of the same GOP leadership team. The far-right Floridian also refused to rule out the possibility of taking on the incumbent Senate minority leader.
Politico reported last week that Scott went so far as to make an announcement video declaring his intentions to run for party leader ahead of the midterm election, but those plans were reportedly derailed by the election results.
Now, evidently, those plans are back on.
He will almost certainly have GOP backers — perhaps not enough to prevail, but certainly enough to make the contest competitive. A wide variety of Senate Republicans, including some of the incoming freshmen, have expressed public opposition to McConnell staying on in his current role, and as recently as yesterday, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz added that he thinks it’d be “insane“ for the party to stick with its current leadership team.
What’s more, Donald Trump has been borderline hysterical in his condemnations of McConnell, and Scott will very likely have the former president’s full support, to the extent that GOP members care.
What’s striking about Scott’s bid, however, is how quickly it comes on the heels of failure.
As regular readers know, it was earlier this year that the Floridian unveiled a far-right blueprint that would’ve, among other things, raised taxes on tens of millions of American families, while putting Social Security and Medicare in jeopardy. Democrats were only too pleased to treat the senator’s plan like a piñata for much of the year, and some in the GOP believe Scott’s blueprint did real harm to the party’s prospects.
At the same time, Scott chaired the National Republican Senatorial Committee in an election cycle in which his party only needed a net gain of one to take the majority. The role gave Scott an opportunity to help recruit like-minded candidates, raise money at the national level, and shape the party’s message, all while positioning himself as a partisan hero. He felt so good about his chances that Scott boasted about a month ago that his party had a path to a majority with 55 seats. It now appears Republicans might end up with a net loss for the election cycle, which appeared to be a political disaster for the ambitious Floridian. And yet, as of this afternoon, Scott is asking for a promotion anyway. Meanwhile, on the other end of Capitol Hill, House Republicans met this afternoon and nominated Kevin McCarthy as the conference’s choice for House speaker in the next Congress. For the Californian, that’s the good news. The bad news is, the final tally was 188 to 31. When all is said and done, McCarthy will be able to lose a small handful of his own members to get the speaker’s gavel, not 31.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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