Senate RINOs spent the last year thwarting President Trump’s desire to pass the SAVE Act,
Then the midterm bill came due.
But one of the Senate’s best-liked Republicans just put his name on paper, and John Thune can’t laugh this one off.
Kennedy Signs the Ron Johnson Letter
US Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) announced he signed a letter from US Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) asking Senate Republicans to slow down their leadership elections.
The conference scheduled those elections for just days after the midterms. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), whose party lost at least seven Senate seats, wants to stay on as the top Republican, this time as minority leader. Nobody has stepped forward to run against him.
Johnson needed five signatures. Under Senate Republican rules, Policy Committee Chair Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) has to call a full conference meeting when five senators ask in writing. Johnson cleared that bar, and Kennedy’s name now sits on the page.
Johnson didn’t mince words. Plowing ahead without a hard look at what went wrong, he said, amounts to “political malpractice.”
“There’s no reason to rush into the elections, particularly after stunning defeat,” Johnson told Major Garrett on The Takeout.
The letter, addressed to Conference Chairman Tom Cotton (R-AR), keeps one eye on the road ahead. “We need to have serious discussions within our conference as to what we can do to improve the outcome in 2028,” Johnson and his cosigners wrote.
Insiders still expect the vote to go forward on schedule. Johnson himself admitted he faces an uphill climb. And Senate Republicans swatted down a similar Johnson effort back in 2022.
But Kennedy’s signature carries a different kind of weight.
Months of Polite Warnings Nobody Heeded
Kennedy isn’t a bomb-thrower. He’s the senator who turns a dry committee hearing into a Louisiana porch story, and colleagues in both parties genuinely like him.
He spent most of the year needling Thune the way a man needles a brother-in-law. Gently, with a grin, and over and over again.
“I love John Thune. He’s better looking than me, but I think he’s just being too cautious,” Kennedy said on CBS’ Face the Nation over the summer.
On the SAVE America Act, the bill requiring proof of citizenship to register and a photo ID to vote, Kennedy laid out the stakes in plain English. “I think we can pass it . . . but we’re not going to know if we don’t try,” he said.
But leadership never really tried.
Thune told reporters that “the votes aren’t there for a talking filibuster,” then set up a vote at the 60-vote threshold that Democrats could kill without breaking a sweat. Chuck Schumer had already branded the bill “Jim Crow 2.0.” The House Freedom Caucus called leadership’s plan “performance theater.”
And when conservatives pushed to keep the Senate in town through the August recess, Kennedy went on record against adjourning. The Senate left anyway.
“I’m very disappointed we didn’t vote,” Kennedy posted on X afterward.
As the campaign heated up, the folksy needling took on an edge. “I love him like a taco, but he’s too cautious,” Kennedy told Roll Call.
Line those quotes up and the signature stops looking sudden. A man who warned in public for months finally did the one thing a senator can do inside the conference that leadership actually has to answer.
Trump Says the Senate Is “Killing Our Country”
President Trump didn’t wait for any conference meeting to weigh in.
“The Senate has to act. The Senate is getting nothing passed, and it’s just killing our country,” Trump told reporters in Florida after remarks at the Kennedy Space Center.
He kept going. “You send things to the Senate when you want it to die,” he said.
And Trump tied the problem directly to the losses. “We had a bad election because of a few things. One thing was not getting things approved in the Senate,” he said.
Trump called Thune a “good man” and left the leadership decision to senators. “It’s going to be up to the Republicans. They choose, I don’t choose,” he said.
Trump adviser Alex Bruesewitz showed a lot less restraint. Reacting to a report that Thune was “gliding” into the minority leader job, he asked, “Why do Hill Republicans insist on rewarding failure?”
That question now hangs over the whole conference.
What the Rush Really Protects
Snap leadership elections are an old Washington habit. The ballots go out while the losing side is still sorting through precinct returns, the incumbent locks up his votes, and the conference holds its postmortem after it hands out the jobs. Funny how that works.
The SAVE America Act was the cleanest test of whether Senate Republican leadership would spend real capital on something the base cared about. Proving a voter is an American citizen isn’t some fringe idea. Leadership treated it as a messaging exercise anyway.
And the base noticed. When Republicans promise a fight and deliver a press release, the folks who knock doors and drive their neighbors to the polls start wondering why they bother. A demoralized base doesn’t announce itself in a poll. It just shows up a little less.
The neoconservatives who pushed the war with Iran own a big share of the wipeout, no question. An NBC News exit poll found 63% of voters called military action against Iran the wrong decision, and 83% of those voters backed Democrats. Even President Trump acknowledged Iran played a part.
But a war that dragged down the ticket doesn’t get the Senate off the hook. Voters who watched gas prices climb, then watched the Senate leave town without a real fight on election integrity, had two reasons to stay home, not one.
Now Democrats take the gavel. Expect them to bury election integrity in committee while pushing their own agenda, and expect them to treat the filibuster Republican leaders guarded so carefully as sacred right up until it gets in their way.
That belongs in any honest postmortem. Before anybody hands out titles.
The 2006 Playbook
Republicans have run this play before.
In 2006, voters fed up with the Iraq War stripped Republicans of their Senate majority. Days later, the conference unanimously elected Mitch McConnell minority leader, with no challenger and no reckoning. McConnell held the job until 2025, and the party establishment went on to lose two more presidential elections before Donald Trump came along.
Kennedy and Johnson want the conversation first and the ballots after. In 2006, nobody in that room even asked.
Sources: Washington Examiner, “Ron Johnson presses to delay Senate GOP leadership elections: ‘Political malpractice’”; Washington Examiner, “Trump rebukes Senate after midterm romp: ‘It’s just killing our country’”; CBS News, 2026 midterm election live updates; The Hill, “Johnson, staunch Trump ally, seeks to delay Senate GOP leadership election after big losses”; Roll Call, “‘The assumption is yes,’ Thune says of another leadership run”; Daily Caller, “Group Of GOP Senators Said They Would Force Vote To Delay Recess Over SAVE Act. What Gives?”; Washington Examiner, “Thune schedules doomed SAVE America Act vote as MAGA pushes filibuster showdown”; CBS News, “Lott Wins No. 2 GOP Senate Post”