John Thune was reelected leader of Senate Republicans on Tuesday. Behind closed doors. By acclamation. Meaning nobody even asked for a vote.
The entire leadership slate came back with him — Barrasso, Cotton, Capito, Lankford, the whole arrangement. The only change anywhere on the org chart is Bernie Moreno replacing Tim Scott at the NRSC, which is roughly like repainting the deck chairs while declining to discuss the iceberg.
Five days earlier, these men presided over the worst Republican midterm in more than sixty years. The Senate is gone, possibly for six years or more. The House is gone. And the conference’s considered judgment, reached in a closed room less than a week after the voters spoke, was that no discussion was necessary, and no public taking of responsibility. Beyond pathetic.
Several senators reportedly asked to delay the election so members could lay out a vision for where the party goes from here. The request was denied and the thing was rushed through. That tells you precisely what this was: not a leadership election but a defensive maneuver, executed fast and behind a door, before anyone outside the room could build a case.
Because a case exists, and everybody in that room knows it.
BREAKING: Sen. John Thune (R-SD) has been reelected as Senate GOP Leader, according to Punchbowl News.
The Senate GOP is full of spineless RINOs. https://t.co/hwNj5RiNVX
— RedWave Press (@RedWavePress) November 10, 2026
The Save America Act is dead. Permanently. Citizenship verification to register to vote, a measure supported by something north of eighty percent of the country and the single most important structural reform available to Republicans, never got a floor vote. Thune’s explanation was that roughly two dozen of his members wouldn’t vote to carve out the legislative filibuster for it. He never named them. He never stripped a gavel, never pulled a committee seat, never made a single senator pay a single price. He counted, reported the number, and went home.
He did this while preserving a procedural tradition that Chuck Schumer’s caucus will eliminate the first morning it becomes inconvenient. The filibuster is going. It has been going for years. Democrats have said so out loud, repeatedly, in public. Thune protected it anyway and handed over the one thing that might have outlasted him in exchange for nothing.
And that was the session. Two years of unified Republican control under a president who won the popular vote, and the deliverables were: making the 2017 tax cuts permanent, which prevented a tax increase, and confirming nominees, which is the constitutional minimum. Analyst Larry O’Connor put it plainly before the election — Republican senators went home to their states without much to show, and that was just the truth.
Now consider who actually paid for that seat majority. Donald Trump campaigned himself into the ground across a dozen states. Elon Musk put $158 million into Texas alone. The tens of millions of voters gave the Republican Party both chambers and the White House in 2024 and asked for roughly four things: the border, the economy, the courts, and honest elections. The Senate delivered on the economy by approving Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill with its permanent tax cuts — and punted on other (bipartisan) popular legislation like election integrity while leaving nearly 100 nominees on the table, including judges.
Then, after losing everything, the men responsible gave themselves their jobs back without a recorded vote.
Shame on the conference for not producing one senator willing to stand up and force a choice. Not one. In a body of a hundred supposedly ambitious people, the number who thought this record deserved a challenge was zero.
They have roughly sixty days of majority left. Confirm everything that moves. Then prepare for two years’ worth of a Democrat clown show.
