These Senators Want Tuesday’s Leadership Vote Delayed. Scott’s Price: Pass Voter ID First.

A week after the midterms, Senate Republicans are scheduled to sit down behind closed doors Tuesday at 9 a.m. and pick their leaders for the next two years. As of now the man expected to win is the same one President Trump has been fighting for months: John Thune of South Dakota.

A growing group of Republican senators says that is backwards.

“After a failure, you have to start with honesty, transparency, and accountability,” Pennsylvania Sen. Dave McCormick wrote Sunday night. “A week ago, we had the worst election results in decades. We need a discussion about what went wrong, how we fix it, what we stand for.” His bottom line, as quoted by Axios: “We need leadership in place fast, but Tuesday is too soon.”

Nine days to pick a leader

Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson started the push last week. His point is simple math. “Since 1934, leadership elections have occurred about 40 days after an election,” he posted. “Since 2006, that timeline has shortened to just nine days. There’s no reason to rush a leadership election — especially after a defeat.”

Utah’s Mike Lee signed on: “We shouldn’t rush back into Senate leadership elections without having some hard, necessary conversations about how we move forward.” Under Senate Republican rules, five senators can force a special meeting of the whole group in writing, and Johnson is expected to hand that letter, with five signatures, to conference chair Tom Cotton on Monday, Semafor reports. That forces a debate. It does not by itself cancel Tuesday’s vote, and in 2022 a similar push to slow things down was beaten.

The voter ID test

Florida Sen. Rick Scott, who has run for leader twice and says he won’t a third time, wants a price for his vote: a promise to pass the SAVE America Act, the bill requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote, before the new Congress sits in January.

“We have two months to get it done,” Scott posted. “Every candidate for a leadership job must commit to passing it. Failure is not an option.” He told Fox News that senators should “stay every day — all through Christmas, all through Thanksgiving, all through New Year’s” to get it done.

Trump’s been saying it all year

None of this is coming out of nowhere. President Trump fought Thune for months over the Senate’s failure to pass the SAVE America Act and over Thune’s refusal to scrap the filibuster, the rule that lets 41 senators block most bills. After the midterms Trump put part of the blame right there: “We had a bad election because of a few things. One thing was not getting things approved in the Senate.”

Asked Friday whether Thune should stay on, Trump stayed out of it. “It’s gonna be up to the Republicans. They choose. I don’t choose,” he said.

What happens next

No senator has formally announced a run against Thune, and the vote is still on the calendar for Tuesday, according to Axios. But the people asking for a pause aren’t fringe. They include a swing-state freshman, the party’s most stubborn conservatives and a two-time leadership candidate, all asking the same question Trump has been asking: if the Senate wouldn’t pass voter ID, why keep the same leaders?

Meanwhile the count goes on in Alaska and Mississippi, where Democrats lead narrowly in races for seats held by Republican Sens. Dan Sullivan and Cindy Hyde-Smith.