Inskeep notes some voters want Schumer to go despite the win he just coordinated
Democrats will elect their leaders next week, and the current leaders are expected to stay in place: Hakeem Jeffries in the House and Chuck Schumer in the Senate, both New Yorkers, Sprunt said. “It’s not to say that there aren’t some rumblings going on,” she added.
No one has come forward to challenge Jeffries or Schumer directly for the top jobs, she said, but a group of senators has said they want new leadership. That group includes Bernie Sanders of Vermont — “No surprise there,” Sprunt said — and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan. There are some senator-elects as well, Sprunt said, like Annie Andrews of South Carolina, who said during the campaign that they want to see change.
Inskeep wondered whether lawmakers were responding to the rumblings of voters who seem unhappy with current leadership and would like to see, in some cases, Schumer go — though Schumer, he noted, “just coordinated a massive election win.” “Well, therein lies the tension, right?” Sprunt replied. That speaks to the challenge, she said: a lot of Democrats “feel that they got a message loud and clear from voters,” and if they do not respond in a way that reflects that sort of hunger for change in leadership, they feel that they “may fall short.”
Senate Republicans held their own closed-door vote Tuesday to pick their leaders. A small group wanted to delay the vote to take more time to process the election results, Sprunt said, but the conference ultimately moved ahead with the vote. John Thune, now the majority leader in the Senate, was reelected.
The Senate ballot came the same day House Republicans elected Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio — whom NPR described as a co-founder of the ultra-conservative Freedom Caucus and a close ally of President Trump — as their top leader, choosing him over Rep. Steve Scalise in a vote by secret ballot. Jordan will replace Speaker Mike Johnson, who, after last week’s midterm losses, says he is stepping down as the top House Republican as the party prepares for life in the minority when the new Congress convenes in January.
In the House race, Jordan positioned himself as a fighter, telling colleagues before the vote that offense, not defense, wins elections and calling himself battle-tested, Sprunt said. He is a veteran of the Judiciary and Oversight Committees, two panels that are going to “play a very big role in the new Congress,” where Democrats already have a long list of targets — and he argued to colleagues that his leadership experience on both committees would help him navigate those impending investigations.
“When Democrats offer more government, we’ll offer more freedom, and we will bring that fight in committee, on the floor and on the stump every single day,” Jordan said in remarks aired by NPR.
Sprunt framed the House contest as a choice between continuity and change. Scalise, the No. 2 Republican in the House, has been in or around leadership for many years and is seen as more of a moderate — an extension of the leadership era of Johnson, she said. Jordan, the change candidate, co-founded the Freedom Caucus, which Sprunt said was often a thorn in the side of Republican leadership. The vote tells her that House Republicans wanted a clean break from that leadership era: “I think folks are craving a new chapter after their massive loss last week,” she said.
Sprunt said the choice of Jordan is illuminating when read alongside President Trump’s placement of Stephen Miller as his new chief of staff. Both men, she said, have a very combative approach to politics — so much so that she remembers former House Speaker John Boehner calling Jordan a “legislative terrorist.” Inskeep noted that the guy calling Jordan a legislative terrorist is himself a Republican, who has sometimes criticized his own party and angered people in his own party.
In Sprunt’s reading, the elevation of the two men suggests that Republicans in the minority are preparing to “lean into the fight rather than leaning into compromise.”