BELGRADE, Montana — National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) chairman Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) warned in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News last month that the Democrats have “radical” power-grabbing plans for the United States if they hold the majority in the upper chamber of Congress.
When asked what the plan is for Republicans to combat that potential by retaking the U.S. Senate majority, Daines — the man who leads the NRSC, the party committee charged with doing so — laid out how close the margins are in the chamber right now, but how very far apart the two parties are ideologically. Daines noted that Vice President Kamala Harris, who — since this interview was filmed, has seen a surge of attention after President Joe Biden’s debate debacle performance — has broken more Senate vote ties than any vice president in history.
“The margins really have never been narrower numerically. We were at a 50-50 Senate last Congress. We’re at 49-51 this Congress. But the ideological divide between Republicans and Democrats has just never been larger,” Daines said. “Kamala Harris has broken more ties as vice president than any vice president in our nation’s history. We’ve had 47 vice presidents, she’s number one. She’s broken some major, consequential-type ties, where for example the $1.9 trillion stimulus package borrowing all this money, washing into the economy borrowed money. That was inflationary. You look at the Inflation Reduction Act, that was an incredibly terrible piece of legislation passed on a tie-breaking vote by Kamala Harris. So, you take a look at what’s up right now in the Senate.”
Daines sat down late last month with Breitbart News for this long-form, on-camera exclusive for more than an hour at his home in Montana just outside of Bozeman, and in this second clip, he lays out the massive stakes of the 2024 U.S. Senate elections.
Daines explains the strategy he has employed to retake the majority, where he set out to find GOP candidates in Senate races who have the ability to unite Republicans and guide them to victory in November.
“We’ve got to find candidates working with President Trump that can win not only primary elections but general elections,” Daines said. “Look, winners make policy. Losers go home.”
If Republicans do not win the U.S. Senate majority this year, Daines warns, the Democrats will nuke the filibuster that currently requires 60 votes to pass most legislation, thereby dropping the total requisite vote count to just 51 so they can ram through a radical agenda. That radical Democrat agenda, Daines notes, includes packing the U.S. Supreme Court to 13 Justices instead of nine, making Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico states to add four new Democrat U.S. senators to the Senate, and conducting a federal takeover of election operations everywhere in the country.
“The consequences of losing right now are profound because, if we don’t take back the majority and the Democrats are in charge, they will blow up the filibuster,” Daines said. “That means D.C. and Puerto Rico are now states. That means four Democrat senators in perpetuity. They will also move the Supreme Court from nine to thirteen Justices. They will pack the court. And last, they will pass one of their favorite bills — the left — and that’s the federal takeover of all the elections. Our Founding Fathers feared concentration of power. That’s one of the things about the separation of powers both in terms of the three branches of government but also the separation of powers between the federal government and the states, the principles of federalism. This bill would remove any voter ID laws that states have passed. It would be all mail-in ballots. They would have cutoffs on Tuesday night on election night at maybe 8 p.m. and have a long tail of maybe two weeks to get all the ballots in. You can see, we lose complete control of elections, and the left does irreparable harm to this country with a power grab that would make it very difficult to ever get a center-right government elected in Washington again.”
The only thing that has stopped Democrats from doing this the last two Congresses is that two senators who now claim to be independents and have since left the Democrat Party and refused to go along with this strategy. Those two senators, Sens. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, are both not running for reelection this cycle. Despite leaving the Democrat Party, they did not join the Republicans and still caucus with Democrats. But since both are leaving the U.S. Senate, Daines warns that if Democrats hold the majority, there will be no dissenting voices left inside the Democrat Party to stop them from going through with their radical power grab plans. Daines points to a written plan from Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the Democrat candidate for U.S. Senate in California this year, who explicitly made these goals clear in what Schiff calls the interest of protecting “democracy.”
“They tried what they call ‘nuke the filibuster’ in the last Congress,” Daines said. “But Sinema and Manchin were the only two that stood with us and both have announced their retirement. There are no more Democrats that are going to stand to protect the filibuster, which means it’s a simple 50-vote-plus-one threshold to put these radical changes into our laws, including imagine the Second Amendment and the gun-grabbing legislation they would pass with just 51 votes. By the way, don’t believe me: Go read what Adam Schiff has written. It’s a sad report, but Adam Schiff is probably going to be the next U.S. senator from California. He telegraphed this in writing earlier this year. So that’s their strategy. We cannot let them succeed and that’s why we have to get at least 51 Republicans in the United States Senate in January of 2025.”
