Senate conservatives are pushing to delay internal leadership elections, which are expected to go forward as scheduled Tuesday.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said Thursday he is collecting signatures to send a letter to leadership calling for a conference meeting before Senate Republicans move forward with their closed-door leadership election.
“We need to delay that. We need a robust discussion — I always call them a postmortem — of what happened. You just can’t, ‘Oh, let’s elect this leadership team by acclimation.’ That’s unacceptable,” Johnson told The Clay & Buck Show.
Under Senate rules, five GOP senators can force a special conference meeting by submitting a formal request in writing. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), a frequent Johnson ally, agreed with him in a social media post and said that he would be signing Johnson’s letter.
“We have no business holding Senate Republican leadership elections until: (1) we’ve had ample opportunity to discuss what happened on Tuesday, and (2) we know who’s going to be in our conference,” Lee wrote.
It’s not the first time Johnson has used the Senate GOP’s rules to force a conference-wide meeting. And Senate Republicans also defeated calls in 2022 to delay their leadership election.
Republican senators and aides said Thursday they don’t currently expect their leadership election to be delayed past Tuesday. Republicans could also technically slot a conference meeting into the schedule before leadership elections.
Johnson acknowledged his uphill climb, adding, “I don’t know that I’ll be able to stop this vote.”
The push to delay the leadership election comes as Senate Majority Leader John Thune is running for a second term in the party’s top spot, from which he would lead the conference in the minority come January.
No Republican senator has said they will oppose Thune, and no one has raised their hand to challenge him, with GOP senators widely expecting him to keep the job.
Johnson appeared to acknowledge that Thune would be leader. Asked if he was going to get a challenge, Johnson asked: “Who would want the job?”
