By Paul Kane (c) 2024 , The Washington Post
In choosing their Senate majority leader, Republicans turned to a consummate insider from the fourth-smallest state by population, a 20-year veteran without close ties to the incoming president.
Sen. John Thune (South Dakota) overcame doubts about his past criticism of President-elect Donald Trump and won his secret-ballot election in an old-fashioned manner. Thune assembled a coalition that began with other GOP allies from similarly small states, defeating big-state, big-money rivals from Texas and Florida.
His victory served as a reminder, possibly a brief one, that the Senate can serve as an independent body free from presidential pressure, given how fiercely some outside allies of Trump campaigned against Thune in the last few days.
To be sure, Thune has spent the past several months trying to reassure the Trump forces that he would be a loyal soldier for an agenda – securing the border, lowering taxes, getting tough on crime – that dovetails with Senate Republicans.
In the news conference for the new leadership team, Thune’s remarks included a reference to a “mandate election” and a vow to keep the Senate in session for lengthy stretches to confirm Trump’s Cabinet selections.
However, when asked about filibuster rules that force 60-vote hurdles on most legislation, Thune retreated into Senate-speak by referring to the chamber’s tradition of being a “place where the minority has a voice.”
That’s his way of trying to say that, should Trump reach a point where he wants to pass legislation by blowing up the filibuster, Senate Republicans intend to oppose him.
Such a clash is almost certain to happen. Several times during his first term, Trump demanded that Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), the majority leader at the time, abolish the 60-vote tradition.
The president-elect never did formally wade into the succession race, but he manipulated the internal debate by issuing demands about blowing up tradition on how his nominees are processed. In response, Thune and his two rivals, Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Rick Scott (R-Florida), spent the past few days promising to speedily process Trump’s Cabinet nominations before they even saw what the incoming president would offer up.
Having banked such initial praise, Trump responded with a slew of choices that will test the bounds of what traditional Senate conservatives can stomach, particularly national security choices such as Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) for attorney general.
“I just heard that,” a stunned Cornyn said Wednesday afternoon, a few hours after losing to Thune, 29-24, on a second ballot. “We’ll do our job as the Senate. … So, we’ll take that one day at a time.”
On Sunday, after Trump demanded quick Senate action on his nominees, Cornyn declared that the Senate should steamroll any Democratic opposition to Cabinet choices by staying “in session, including weekends, until they relent.”
Cornyn tried to deflect any specifics about Gaetz, who has been under FBI and House ethics investigations related to allegations regarding sex trafficking, and has spent most of his eight years in Congress antagonizing traditional Republicans such as Cornyn.
“I don’t know the man, other than his public persona,” Cornyn said. Pressed by reporters on Thursday, Cornyn said he would “absolutely” want to review a yet-to-be-released House Ethics Committee report on Gaetz.
Trump’s moves will serve as an initial test of the power he wields over his allies on Capitol Hill, a group he wants to fall in line quickly rather than serve as guardrails of normalcy, as some congressional Republicans attempted when he first took the Oval Office in 2017.
Thune and his new top deputy, Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyoming), elected unanimously as majority whip, have to determine whether they are willing to tell Trump that selections like Gaetz cannot win confirmation.
Or they will have to swallow choices, which also include former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (Hawaii), nominated to be the director of national intelligence, that do not fit anywhere within their normal ideological range.
When it came to electing their own leader, senators demonstrated that they would stick to tradition and decide things based on personal relationships and, of course, their own self-interest.
On Tuesday evening, Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-North Dakota) told reporters that Thune could immediately count the support of the three other senators from the Dakotas.
“As long as the spirit of Theodore Roosevelt is alive, the Dakotans will stick together,” Cramer said, referencing the 26th president’s pre-White House days of ranching in the Dakota Territory.
Add in Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kansas), who won a House seat in 1996 alongside Thune and became one of his closest friends, and Thune had five votes to start from three states with a combined population of less than 5 million people.
Cornyn could not even guarantee the support of his home-state colleague, Sen. Ted Cruz (R), who announced that he would support Scott on the first ballot. Cruz has not said who he voted for on a second ballot between Cornyn and Thune.
Self-interest would have pointed Cruz toward Thune so that Cruz can claim the chairmanship of the Senate Commerce Committee. Had Thune lost and returned to the life of a rank-and-file senator, he had the seniority on the Commerce Committee to bump Cruz aside.
In Thune, Republicans continued their almost 40-year run of choosing leaders from relatively small states, beginning in 1984, when Robert J. Dole of Kansas won a hotly contested race to become majority leader.
From 1961 through 2016, Democrats elected leaders who hailed from Montana, West Virginia, Maine, South Dakota and Nevada.
In early 2017, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D) became the first New Yorker to lead Democrats or Republicans. Republicans have never elected a leader from Texas, despite its status as the largest reliably Republican state in presidential campaigns for the past four decades.
For the small-state crew, Thune’s win reaffirmed their faith in the Founding Fathers for creating a Senate that gave each state two senators, regardless of size.
“It’s the beauty of the Senate. It’s the beauty of the founders. That’s the beauty of the electoral college,” Cramer said. “It’s designed specifically for leveling the playing field for places in the middle of the country that have a lot of minerals and not many people.”
Scott ran as the most publicly supportive of Trump, garnering the backing of MAGA celebrities such as Tucker Carlson and Trump’s billionaire booster Elon Musk. But his candidacy was always seen as a vessel for those who have clashed with McConnell over his traditional conservative approach to running the Senate.
These Scott supporters knew he stood little chance and that no one was likely to get a full majority (27 votes) on the first vote. They used their initial backing of Scott to essentially interview Cornyn and Thune to see what types of pledges they would offer for their backing on a second vote.
Cornyn, 72, and Thune, 63, have remarkably similar backgrounds.
They each have served 16 years in some role on McConnell’s team, including six each as Republican whip, the No. 2 leadership post. They both serve on the Senate Finance Committee and believe in America’s strong role around the world.
Both were deeply critical of Trump’s handling of the 2020 election, but Thune went a step further and endorsed another Republican, Sen. Tim Scott (South Carolina), in early 2023 for this year’s presidential nomination.
Each endorsed Trump early this year after it became clear that he would run away with the GOP nomination.
“They’re both really good leaders, and they’ve both been at this a long time, if you want to talk about guys that have been on the job kind of learning through it,” said Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma), who supported Cornyn.
Some staunch conservatives viewed Cornyn as a bit more vocal in his willingness to open up the leadership approach and allow their input into legislation.
“I thought John Cornyn represented more of a change going forward. I mean, based on what he said he was going to do,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) told reporters after the vote.
But the initial ballot found 23 supporting Thune, 15 for Cornyn, 13 for Scott and two who wrote in some other choice. Thune needed to win just four of those 15 senators who voted for someone not named John on the first ballot, and he secured six more votes.
Within a couple hours, Trump nominated Gaetz and Gabbard, and Cornyn almost looked relieved not to be in charge of shepherding support for their nominations.
“We will take it in due course and do our job,” he said.