Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) is being seen as an unmitigated disaster, and those who have been calling for his removal are stuck with no way to force him out during the 119th Congress.
Groomed for years by former majority leader Mitch McConnell, Thune was selected to head up the new GOP majority after the 2024 election, only to spend nearly a year and a half squandering an electoral mandate to deliver change with no failure more galling than his inability to advance the Save America Act to stave off the inevitable Democrat midterm cheating.
Thune’s colleague, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who has been critical of the feckless leader, delivered the bad news in a post to X this week, noting that it’s much easier to change leadership in the House of Representatives than in the upper chamber in response to a user who mistakenly believed that a handful of senators could initiate a process to replace Thune.
Your question suggests five senators could oust him in the middle of his term as leader. That’s not true.
In the House of Representatives, a tiny number of lawmakers can oust the speaker—at any time. That feature is unique to the House.
In the Senate GOP we don’t even have a…
— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) May 1, 2026
“Your question suggests five senators could oust him in the middle of his term as leader. That’s not true,” Lee began. “In the House of Representatives, a tiny number of lawmakers can oust the speaker—at any time. That feature is unique to the House. In the Senate GOP we don’t even have a rule or procedure for replacing a leader in the middle of a two-year term.”
“It is true that under our rules, any five senators can call for a meeting of the entire conference at any time. But in practice, that kind of meeting tends not to materialize unless a solid majority of the conference wants it to happen,” he continued.
“Even if such a meeting were called and even if it actually materialized, it still wouldn’t end as you seem to assume. To pursue the outcome you’re suggesting, one would have to use that meeting to propose a new procedure for a mid-term leadership swap, and that—at a minimum—would require a majority of the conference to support it. For a whole host of reasons—including the fact that Senator Thune is beloved by colleagues and very popular within the conference—the odds of that happening are literally 0 in 100,000,” the Utah Republican explained, putting the odds of ousting Thune as less than impossible.
Many are laying the blame for not delivering on President Donald J. Trump’s agenda squarely at the feet of Thune who in addition to failing to move the common sense voter ID measures that are overwhelmingly favored by Americans, has also run up the white flag on getting rid of the filibuster which is now being abused by the same Democrats who will immediately move to eliminate it the second that they retake power.
And as Lee points out, there is not a thing that Republicans can do about him.
