During this week’s broadcast of FNC’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) criticized Senate Republicans for pushing forward to have leadership elections before the elections for Georgia and Alaska U.S. Senator were settled.
Johnson described it as “absurd” and “preposterous” to proceed without an autopsy of the 2022 elections.
“It would be preposterous to hold elections before we even know that we have a senator from Georgia or who our standard from Alaska is going to be,” he said. “Plus, I agree with Rick Scott. We need to do a real assessment of what went wrong. The last two years, we had — as you put up under graphic there, we had a number of our colleagues join Democrats spending like drunken sailors. I heard repeatedly when they joined in the — for example, the infrastructure spending bill, rather than repurpose $700 billion from the COVID relief, and apply that to our infrastructure, inside the conference, it was, well, infrastructure is spending so popular. Let’s spend more than a trillion. That obviously was not a winning message or a winning agenda. That was a losing message, a losing agenda. And we need to discuss that internally. We need to have thorough discussions internally.”
“And as I talked to my colleagues before I left town, if I survived reelection, we need a different governing model for our conference that’s far more collaborative, that is more businesslike,” Johnson continued. “That’s another thing that I liked what Rick talked about. As a businessperson, you come into the dysfunction that not is — that is not only Washington, D.C., and Congress, but our conference. I mean, we don’t discuss numbers. We don’t have an organized format for laying out how we should come down and how we should set agenda on some of these major issues. So, we need serious discussions. We can’t have those in a couple of days. That’s going to take about a month. And I think Democrats are smart in terms of delaying their elections until, I think, the first week in December. We ought to follow suit.”
[I]f we hold those elections right away Wednesday, you probably have more campaigning done in a high school class president election than we would have in the most deliberative body in the world,” he said later in the segment. “It is absurd. It is preposterous. They need to be delayed. We need to have these discussions.”
