'Highly contentious': How 'bad blood' fueled a bitter rivalry among 'warring' Senate Republicans

18 November 2022

Republican leadership will remember the 2022 midterms for, among other things, the tensions between Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Rick Scott, who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC). Scott took offense when McConnell, over the summer, commented on the “quality” of U.S. Senate candidates who were being promoted by the NRSC and former President Donald Trump.

Scott’s allies were hoping that he would replace McConnell as GOP leader in the Senate, which didn’t happen. McConnell will still be Senate minority leader in 2023 no matter how much Trump rails against him.

The tensions and rivalries among Senate Republicans are the focus of an article published by Politico on November 18. Journalist Burgess Everett takes a look at the civil “war” and infighting that Republican leadership experienced during the midterms and the political outlook for 2023, when Republicans will have a small majority in the U.S. House of Representatives but not in the U.S. Senate.

“Tension built within the Senate GOP for nearly two years, from former President Donald Trump’s post-insurrection impeachment through a host of bipartisan Biden-era deals that many Republicans opposed,” Everett explains. “And after the party’s midterm election losses, those cracks turned into a chasm. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) mounted a challenge to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell that embodied the conservative griping about the Kentuckian’s leadership style…. As GOP senators spent roughly 10 hours in private meetings this week that, at times, grew highly contentious, the conference cleaved over a same-sex marriage bill that most of them opposed.”

Everett continues, “When McConnell defeated Scott, 37-10 — a tally that some Republican senators still won’t talk about — the intraparty whispers and rumors of opposition to the tight-gripped leader finally got quantified on paper. The GOP now hopes that its factions — or warring families, as Mario Puzo would put it — are at peace.”

The late Mario Puzo was the author of the 1969 crime novel “The Godfather,” which director Francis Ford Coppola adapted for his famous 1972 film of the same name and its sequels “The Godfather, Part 2” in 1974 and “The Godfather, Part 3” in 1990. Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana paraphrased a line from “The Godfather” when he discussed GOP infighting with Politico, saying, “You’ve gotta have a war every five or 10 years to get rid of the bad blood, and then, you start over.”

The “bad blood” between McConnell and his critics in the GOP — namely, Scott and Trump — hasn’t been hard to miss. When Scott proposed raising federal taxes on lower income earners so that they could have some “skin in the game,” McConnell made it clear that he wasn’t on board with that idea.

According to Everett, “McConnell preferred to make this fall’s Senate races a referendum on President Joe Biden, much to the chagrin of Republicans like Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson and Rick Scott, who proposed his own list of conservative priorities that became Democratic attack-ad fodder.”

Everett notes that a recent “handful of ugly encounters” among Senate Republicans “will linger.”

“After some senators asked for an accounting of the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s financial moves under Scott,” Everett observes, “the campaign arm chief fired back in a press release that under former Chair Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.), it had offered ‘unauthorized’ bonuses to staffers at the end of 2020. Young offered a chilly response on Thursday, (November 17).”

Sen. Tommy Tuberville believes that the 2022 midterms results have created “frustration” among Senate Republicans.

The right-wing Alabama Republican told Politico, “Sometimes, we air our laundry too much. A lot of that had to do with: ‘We just got our tail kicked. We’re 21-point favorites, and we lost.’ So, I think that brings on frustration. I’ll tell you, I’ve been there.”

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