Winner and Loser of the week in Florida politics – Week of January 27

Welcome to the Super Bowl edition of our weekly exercise known as “Winners and Losers” – politics style.

While we can only guess who wins the Big One between the Chiefs and 49ers because this was written about 28 hours before kickoff, we already have the final result of “W&L” and it is not subject to further review.

Here we go:

Winners:

Rick Scott 2024? Florida’s junior U.S. Senator has everyone wondering what he’s up to.

He got deserved applause for calling out the lobbying firm of Foley & Lardner representing Venezuelan Inspector General Reinaldo Munoz, the top lawyer for the brutal Nicolas Maduro. The firm quickly severed ties with Munoz.

Scott also paid for a TV ad in Iowa where he called out Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden for actions in Ukraine.

“Vice President Biden threatened a foreign country and forced them to fire a prosecutor who was investigating a company paying his son $83,000 a month,” Scott said in the ad. “Biden got away with it, and his son got paid.”

The ad is misleading on many fronts, but the timing and content have people wondering if Scott didn’t just launch his 2024 campaign for President. Stay tuned.

Follow the money: Former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s self-funded TV blitz campaign is gaining ground in the fight to be the Democratic nominee for President.

A St. Pete Polls survey put him second in Florida with 17 percent, well behind Biden (41 percent) but that’s still more than Bernie Sanders (9 percent) and Elizabeth Warren (7 percent) combined.

But we can only have one top winner per week, and that honor goes to….

Super South Florida: Estimates vary on the economic impact on the city that hosts the Super Bowl, and critics say they’re wildly inflated.

But here are a few fun facts that seem reasonable. Tourism officials estimate about 200,000 people journeyed to South Florida to enjoy the spectacle, even if they didn’t have tickets for the game.

Nearly 200 million inhabitants of the planet will watch the game on TV, which turns into a global infomercial for Miami.

And did we mention it’s just a blast to have this kind of attention?

Oh, Florida gets to reap another bonanza next year. The game will be played at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa.

Losers:

Oh, Pam: Florida’s former Attorney General, Pam Bondi, was roundly called out for being hypocritical during her defense of President Trump at his impeachment trial.

Bondi repeatedly pushed the angle that the President was trying to get to the bottom of corruption involving Hunter Biden during his now-infamous phone call to the President of Ukraine. The words were barely out of her mouth before her own past was brought into play.

Remember that $25,000 contribution to her campaign in 2013 by Trump’s foundation? And remember how shortly after that, Bondi said the state wouldn’t investigate allegations of fraud against Florida citizens by Trump University?

I guess she forgot about Google.

Your tax dollars at work: An Orlando Sentinel investigation uncovered 156 private Christian schools with anti-gay policies received $129 million from Florida’s school voucher program. The money helped pay the tuition for 20,800 students.

Sentinel columnist Scott Maxwell noted that “One school told a mother — a firefighter married to U.S. Air Force veteran — that her children were unfit to be educated there simply because the couple was two women.”

That school received $371,000 in taxpayer money.

But just as there can be only one big winner, so we now come to the part of this exercise where we name the week’s biggest loser. That scarlet D for “Dubious” goes to …

Marco! Yes, folks, just when it seemed that some Republicans couldn’t contort themselves anymore to avoid voting to remove Trump from office, along came Florida Senator Marco Rubio.

In a lengthy statement on Medium.com, Rubio explained he could not vote to remove the President because, oh, let’s let him tell it.

“Just because actions meet a standard of impeachment does not mean it is in the best interest of the country to remove a President from office,” he wrote.

And this: “Can anyone doubt that at least half of the country would view his removal as illegitimate — as nothing short of a coup d’état?”

Oh, and on the question of calling witnesses to testify, he said this: “… new witnesses that would testify to the truth of the allegations are not needed for my threshold analysis, which already assumed that all the allegations made are true.”

So, let’s recap.

Rubio believes the allegations are true and meet a standard of impeachment. But he won’t vote to remove because half the country would be upset. What about the half that would approve of removal?

Well, most of them are Democrats who wouldn’t vote for Rubio anyway.