Exclusive — Sen. Ron Johnson Hopes for Delay of Senate Leadership Vote, Calls McConnell Push ‘Grotesque’

Senate Republicans are set to gather behind closed doors on Wednesday to select a new party leader after securing the majority — and as Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) serves his final days as Senate minority leader.

But Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) hopes his colleagues will vote to delay the decision in favor of taking more time to vet Sen. John Thune (R-SD), Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), and Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), who are all vying for Senate majority leader, he said during an interview on Breitbart News Daily.

“I’m hoping it gets delayed. I mean…again — this is a McConnell move. It’s grotesque,” said Johnson, who supports Sen. Scott’s leadership bid. “We’re not even going to be back in for 24 hours. We [GOP senators] spoke about this. We were going to break this up. We all agreed we wanted to elect a leader before Thanksgiving — we didn’t have to do it within less than 24 hours when we return. That’s sick.” 

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Host Mike Slater asked Johnson why holding the vote so soon after the election presents a problem, to which Johnson pointed out that he and his colleagues will not get the opportunity to fully question candidates before casting a vote.

“Because we haven’t even had a candidate forum, where we have all three candidates up there — we can pepper them with questions, we can see how they react,” he said. “There have been some one-on-one meetings. But again, we should have this in…a debate forum. Let’s get up there, let’s spend hours peppering these guys with, ‘How are you going to handle this situation? What are you going to do with this? What are your top priorities?’ We need to hear that.” 

“He [McConnell] engineered it [the early vote], and our conference chair called the meeting. So we’ll have it. Again, I’m hoping we vote to delay the vote,” he added. 

Reports emerged as early as September, before Republicans won the Senate majority, that McConnell would work behind the scenes to have influence over who replaces him. Among Republicans who stand by the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, Sen. Rick Scott is seen as a the top contender, and has been endorsed by Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Sens. Thune and Cornyn are seen as establishment-backed candidates.

“What the hell is going on in the US Senate? Hours after Donald Trump wins the most conclusive mandate in 40 years, Mitch McConnell engineers a coup against his agenda by calling early leadership elections in the senate,” Tucker Carlson wrote in a post to X on Sunday.

“Two of the three candidates hate Trump and what he ran on. One of them, John Cornyn, is an angry liberal whose politics are indistinguishable from Liz Cheney’s,” he added. “The election is Wednesday, it’s by secret ballot, and it will determine whether or not the new administration succeeds. Rick Scott of Florida is the only candidate who agrees with Donald Trump. Call your senator and demand a public endorsement of Rick Scott. Don’t let McConnell get away with it again.”

“Without Rick Scott, the entire Trump reform agenda [is] wobbly,” RFK Jr. replied.

Johnson accused McConnell of running a “one-man dictatorship” as leader.

“We had no idea what his strategy was,” he said, using the border bill as one of the latest examples.

“All we were asking for is an enforcement mechanism to force Biden to use the authority he had to secure the border. We would have been happy to strengthen that authority. Nobody asked for an immigration bill, certainly not that awful one that he ended up negotiating as a total breach of leadership responsibility, but he just dropped that on the conference, and all of our jaws dropped,” he said, contrasting McConnell’s leadership style with that of Scott.

“So one-man dictatorship versus Rick Scott,” he said, praising Scott’s business sense.

“When you run an organization, you can’t be a dictator. You have to be collaborative. Your organization has to know: Here’s our mission, here are our goals, here’s your role in fulfilling those goals. So it’d be a far more collaborative process. Listen, we have smart people in the Senate. I mean, people may not agree with that, but we do. We’ve got accomplished people that can contribute, and the role of the leaders is to find those you know, those competencies in those individuals and use them fully. But again, bring everybody on board,” he said, explaining that Scott has done this “repeatedly in business, and then as governor of a state, as being an executive.”

“We need that type of leadership — that kind of functioning organization in the United States Senate. So we haven’t had it. We haven’t had … [it] in the 14 years I’ve been here,” Johnson said.

Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.