Rep. Anna Paulina Luna said House Republicans should not give the power back to the leaders who led them to a disappointing midterm and backed Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio as Minority Leader over Majority Leader Steve Scalise.
On Tuesday, House Republicans elected Jordan, the chair of the Judiciary Committee, as their leader by a 106-73 vote in a secret, closed-door ballot. The result came just one week after Democrats took control of both chambers, and Jordan will take over the duty of minority leader when the new Congress convenes in January.
Asked if Republicans should put the same people back in charge, Luna, a Florida Republican, said no.
“If you have a play and you get destroyed, you don’t put the same people back in charge that were part of running that failed play,” she said. “And so what I would tell you is that we have an opportunity here.”
“Obviously, the American people have spoken,” Luna said. “But what I will tell you is that a majority of the messaging that so many members were trying to push for, things that people cared about, they didn’t listen to.”
She hinted at the importance of leadership’s ties to special interests, saying, “Whether it is their ties to special interests or not, I’m here to do my job and to represent.”
“And I think that it would have gone a heck of a lot different if we were able to actually fight on some of these issues,” she said.
Asked to name the issues leadership ignored, Luna started with the SAVE America Act, a Republican elections bill, and the effort to merge it with other bills.
“I would say for the first one, it was the SAVE America and forcing the merger of the legislation,” Luna said. “You guys saw that we actually had to force to shut down the House in order to merge that.”
Earlier this year, Luna led several House Republicans to agree to block any Senate-passed bill from being taken up in the House until the Senate approved the SAVE America Act. Luna said that leverage was gone when senators got around the holdouts.
“And then when the Senate wanted to get their bills passed, they called leadership. They called Scalise and actually brokered back‑room deals to get these bills passed by suspension,” she said. “So we had no leverage. OK, so that’s why I’m supporting Jim Jordan.”
Bills brought up under suspension of the rules avoid going through the usual process on the House floor but still need a supermajority to pass.
Luna’s second complaint was about a bill to ban stock trading by members of Congress.
“The second thing would have been for the banning insider trading stuff. We’ve been pushing this. They sent down a watered-down version of that bill,” Luna said.
She said she’s considering another discharge petition, an approach that can force a floor vote against the wishes of leadership if signed by a majority of House members, to extend the ban to the executive branch.
“I’m actually considering now doing another discharge petition probably next week on putting the executive branch to actually get it over the finish line because I genuinely believe in that,” she said. “I think that’ll help clean up Washington. But again, it was the banning insider trading stuff.”
Luna also criticized leadership for resisting efforts to crack down on glyphosate, the ubiquitous weedkiller.
Her third example was a bill to cap interest on federal student loans at 2.5%, an issue that she said has bipartisan support and support from President Donald Trump.
“And then the third thing would be these common-sense pieces of legislation, which, by the way, the president has said that he supports, which would be capping student loan interest at 2.5%,” Luna said. “That was a massively bipartisan thing that a majority of the American people support.”
A formula in federal law determines federal student loan interest rates.
“As you know, we have regulation over federal student loan interest rates,” she said.
Luna characterized all three issues as fights that Republicans could have won with better leadership, and as priorities the party should fight for as it looks ahead to the 2028 elections.
Jordan has backed Luna since her first election to Congress in 2022.
Scalise, who has been a member of House Republican leadership since 2014, presented himself to his colleagues as a unifier and emphasized his fundraising ability, noting that he raised $67.9 million for this year’s midterms. Jordan stressed his experience in fighting Democrats in committee rooms and warned his colleagues about the investigations into the Trump administration that Democrats will conduct.
Speaker Mike Johnson did not run for the minority leader position after Republicans lost more than 40 House seats.
