Rick Scott bullish on Amy Barrett vote despite sick Senators

Roughly 24 hours after mistakenly telling a national audience he’d tested positive for COVID-19, Sen. Rick Scott returned to the Fox News Channel Sunday.

The Senator took to Fox and Friends Weekend, making familiar arguments for the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett despite two members of the Judiciary Committee actually testing positive for the novel coronavirus.

The timing will work out, the Senator claimed: Scott postulated that even with two members of the committee sidelined due to positive tests, there’s still a path to litigate Barrett’s qualifications ahead of a late-October vote.

“We’ve been doing virtual committee meetings since March, and so this will have no impact,” Scott noted when asked about the logistics of fast-tracking the nomination amidst pandemic precautions. “Senators Mike Lee and Thom Tillis can participate by videoconference just like we’ve been doing. It shouldn’t slow it down.

Scott is “very confident that Amy Coney Barrett has the votes.” And while the logistics of the vote itself present some potential challenges, the first-term Republican Senator thinks the hurdles can be overcome.

“Democrats just don’t want Barrett to be confirmed,” Scott added, prognosticating that Democrats who have said “they don’t want to participate … might speed up the whole process and we can even do it earlier.”

But not too early, Scott asserted.

“When we ultimately will vote for her the last week of October, we’ll all need to be there to vote in person,” the Senator said. “We’re not doing that virtually.”

Despite the obvious logistical and health hurdles of bringing theoretically post-viral Senators back into the chamber to fast track the vote, Scott says it can be done “very cautiously, very safely.”

“When we vote, we typically aren’t all there at the same time,” Scott said. “You can vote at the back of the chamber.”

Scott made similar points Monday morning on the Fox Business Channel with host Stuart Varney, expressing untrammelled confidence that health concerns won’t slow the vote down.