Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) believes Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) is the best candidate for Senate Majority Leader to deliver on President-elect Donald Trump’s agenda, he explained Monday in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News.
The legendary college football coach and Alabama senator endorsed Scott over Sens. John Thune (R-SD) and John Cornyn (R-TX). While Tuberville said he is friends with all three, Scott is more likely to shakeup the Senate status quo after 18 years of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) leading Republicans.
“I’m looking for a new direction,” Tuberville told Breitbart News. “John Thune has been in leadership. John Cornyn has been in leadership. Rick Scott is a businessman by trade. He was governor of Florida, and he knows President Trump very well, has been with him the whole way.”
Scott’s history supporting Trump weighs heavily in his favor at a make-or-break time for the America First agenda, Tuberville said.
“The other two were kind of little sketchy on President Trump early, finally decided to get on,” he said. “But at the end of the day, we’re going to have a majority in the Senate and be able to control the floor of the Senate for the next two years, and I want to make sure that we don’t do anything to take away from Donald Trump’s first two years because it’s going to be two of the most important years of our lifetime to get all these crazies out of the way, get our country back on track.”
Republican senators and senators-elect will meet Tuesday evening for a candidate roundtable before electing a new slate of leaders Wednesday by secret ballot. Most senators have not tipped their hand yet, leaving the race up for grabs.
“He’s got to earn it,” Tuberville said of Scott. “The next two days, there’ll be a lot of discussion. They’ll be talking to the members, but the vote will be Wednesday, and we’ll see what happens.”
A handful of conservative senators, led by Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), seek reforms in the operation of the Senate that would empower individual senators and committees to consider legislation and amendments, among other changes. With no clear leader among the three candidates, those conservative senators are hoping to extract promises from the eventual winner that would lead to a more egalitarian Senate.
While those dynamics fuel hopes that the Senate will operate differently regardless of who wins, the Senate still needs a leader with a strong backbone, Tuberville said.
“We do need somebody that’s going to stand up to Chuck Schumer because he’s going to try to hold everything up, try to run us in the ground, try to hold President Trump’s agenda, and we got to have a plan to stop that,” he told Breitbart News.
Scott discussed his plan to deliver on Trump’s agenda Tuesday in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News, promising “to get his nominees done quickly” before moving to a legislative agenda.
“We know Schumer’s going to try to block them, and then anything that needs legislation, we got to figure out how to get it done, whether reconciliation or if it takes 60 votes, we’re gonna have to say, ‘how do we come together to fulfill Trump’s agenda that the public demand has demanded?’” Scott said.
Representatives for Thune and Cornyn declined Breitbart News’s interview requests.
Thune, McConnell’s top deputy in the leadership hierarchy, and Cornyn, who preceded Thune before stepping aside due to Republican Conference term limit rules, were elected to their posts in a different era of the party. Tuberville pointed to the expansion of the Republican Party under Trump, contending that the GOP Senate “need(s) to be able to grab a hold of that and hold on to it and represent all those people.”
But the leader must stand up for his Republican senators too — not just against Democrats, but their establishment media allies. McConnell has faced criticism for working more closely with Schumer than his own conference, most notably on foreign aid and spending bills.
The leader should be “somebody that’s going to speak up for us, that’s going to stand up to the mainstream media — and we all know how they are,” Tuberville said.
Part of that is a leader’s willingness “to listen to everybody” in his own conference, not advance his own agenda or even retaliate against his colleagues.
“The problem is, right now, there’s not many voices in the United States Senate,” Tuberville said. “When Sen. McConnell has been the leader, he’s basically controlled everything. But I’m looking for an opportunity to be able to say what I want when I want to, and not have to look behind my back.”
Trump’s mandate from the American people extends to the Senate, Tuberville believes, and Republicans should get serious about working to honor that mandate in the Upper Chamber of the Capitol as well as the White House.
“This is a new time, a new era,” he said. “We’ve got the Democrats on the run … We have to take advantage of this because they are going to do everything they possibly can to hold us back, whether it’s in the House, whether it’s the Senate or President Trump, and we’ve got to have fighters — somebody’s going to stand up and say it like it is, and don’t worry about hurting somebody’s feelings.”
Tuberville does not buy the argument that senators who have spent years in leadership possess fundraising chops that cannot be replicated by new blood. And he does not believe its healthy for the conference to have one leader dictate how the campaign funds are allotted.
“We should have a committee of three or four people that allots all that money out, not one person,” Tuberville said. “I know there’ve been several instances in 2022 and this year where I would have voted totally different on sending money to a Senate candidate when I felt very strongly that would have helped somebody else.”
He also believes the leadership PAC has been used to help Republican candidates who would feel beholden to the man holding the pursestrings.
“Having a leadership PAC used to basically, at the end of the day, say, ‘Okay, I helped you get elected. I need your vote to be leader again,’ see what I’m saying? We don’t need that,” Tuberville said. “We need a leader that’s going to worry about running the Senate and not worry about maintaining that position as leader.”
Scott echoed that position when talking to Breitbart News.
“This money is not given for the leader,” he insisted. “The money is given to win elections. It’s not to win elections that the leader wants, its to win elections that are good for Republicans. So my role would be to do what I did in business, get feedback, get people involved.”
Tuberville equates advancing Trump’s agenda with winning, and the coach wants to put the best player on the field.
“I don’t want us to take somebody just because they were number two,” Tuberville said, insisting each candidate should make the case on their merits.
“This thing kind of got out of control early because John Thune said, ‘Well, I’m number two. I deserve this promotion.’ No, no, no, no. That doesn’t work like that,” he insisted. “It’d be like in college, you lose the head coach and you promote the offensive coordinator to be the head coach. Well, nobody knows whether he can handle it or not. He hasn’t been there and done that.”
Scott’s real world success tips the scales in his favor, Tuberville believes.
“Rick Scott has been in the fire before because he’s been in a huge business world in health care, and he understands the country and how to make decisions, how to hold up under pressure,” he said.
Bradley Jaye is a Capitol Hill Correspondent for Breitbart News. Follow him on X/Twitter at @BradleyAJaye.
