Please, tea party: Do us all a favor and spare us from Mr. Turtle!
Tea partiers may have failed in their effort to knock off Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in this year's primary election, but they're starting to outline another way to dump him from his leadership position: Forcing him to step down if Democrats hang on to the Senate majority in November's election. And some of them actually seem a little bit eager for that to happen,
for example:
“If Republicans can’t win a majority with such a poor performing president, during his lame-duck midterm elections, the leadership needs to be replaced starting with Mitch McConnell,” said Ken Cuccinelli, president of the Senate Conservatives Fund, which has backed conservative opponents against candidates favored by party leaders in GOP primaries.
Cuccinelli added, “McConnell blew millions in red-state primaries to protect incumbents from more electable conservatives, he violently attacked his own base, he vehemently avoided any agenda for the party to stand on … there’s no question that Mitch McConnell put himself and his desire to ‘crush conservatives’ ahead of the best interests of the party and the country.”
The Hill also quoted the heads of FreedomWorks and The Madison Project with the same message. No senators would go on the record on the topic, though two said anonymously that McConnell could be vulnerable. The ace up his sleeve? The fact that being minority leader would be a thankless role.
There's also one other obvious way that McConnell could be out: Kentucky voters could send him packing. The polls have shown him with a fairly consistent—albeit small—lead, but the most recent survey in the race put Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes in the lead. And if tea partiers really want to remove people like Mitch McConnell from leadership positions in the Republican Party, Kentucky would be the easiest place to start, because if enough of them don't vote for McConnell, Senate Republicans will have to pick a new leader, whether or not they retake control of the chamber.
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