Rick Scott warns Republicans: Don’t fall for the ‘Democratic lie’ on bailouts

Rick Scott. Image via AP.

U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, fears that his colleagues are “ready to cave” on a fat stimulus bill that rewards the policy priorities of the hard left.

In an editorial published Saturday by National Review Online, the first-term Senator and former two term Governor of the state of Florida warns the GOP is ready to give in.

“Too many of my Republican colleagues have bought their lie and are getting ready to cave,” Scott said regarding so-called blue state bailouts, funding splashes that Scott and other Republicans contend are to defray high legacy costs and inefficient government rather than cost of the virus itself.

“Some of my Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill have bought the Democratic lie that preventing bailouts for liberal states would lead to disastrous consequences. They’re getting ready to capitulate and give hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money to Governors [Andrew] Cuomo and [Gavin] Newsom and [J.B.] Pritzker, all of whom are refusing to open their states, get kids back in classrooms, and get their economies on the road to recovery,” Scott added.

“Bailing out those who have done so much damage to their states and our country already,” Scott concluded, “would be a boondoggle of epic proportions.”

What’s new here are the unspoken realities of 2021 in Washington, D.C., a place where an unpredictable Republican President will shortly be supplanted by a Democratic administration, aided and abetted by legislative veterans of the same party who will narrowly control the House and have at least a meaningful minority in the Senate.

Scott, who has voiced repeated concerns about accountability of funds vis a vis the CARES Act, recycled those plaints here.

“We don’t even know how much of the $1 trillion allocated to states and local governments by the CARES Act has already been spent, and they won’t tell us. I and Senator Ron Johnson have written multiple letters to every Governor in America asking for a breakdown of how they’ve spent their states’ CARES Act money. Just ten of them have responded. Only in Washington does it make sense to consider sending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to states and local governments that refuse to tell us how, or even if, they’ve used the $1 trillion we sent them nine months ago.”