Rick Scott doubles down against ‘corporate welfare,’ vows revenge on ‘woke’ companies

U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, under fire for using the National Republican Senatorial Committee as a tool of personal branding, stayed on the offense Tuesday.

During a national television hit Tuesday, Scott doubled down on attacks on “corporate welfare” and vowed that companies would pay for abandoning Georgia after it changed its voting laws.

This continues a stunning rhetorical evolution for Scott, an independently wealthy businessman who made incentives a big part of his administration’s economic policy when he was Governor of Florida.

Scott accused corporations of “oneupmanship with how woke they can be” and of “playing to a leftist mob” for taking issue with voting law changes in Georgia.

“These woke companies and CEOs are lecturing the rest of us and it’s not going to work,” Scott thundered. He attacked corporations such as Coca-Cola, Delta, and Major League Baseball for caving to “this woke crowd” and “getting played by the left” for doing business in China and Cuba but objecting to Georgia requiring identification to vote.

At times, Scott suggested corporations owed the GOP fealty for previous favorable deals.

“They’re so inconsistent with what they’re saying. They’ll go to China, they’ll go to Cuba and they’ll kowtow to make some money. But gosh, in America? No! They’re better than all the rest of us,” Scott said.

“These companies that come up here, I watched them when I was Governor of Florida. They’d say ‘help us, help us, help us’. And there’s all this corporate welfare. It’s going away,” Scott asserted, because Republicans are “fed up.”

The Senator singled out the airline industry as especially ungrateful.

“Think about these airlines. How much money did we give the airline industry just last year in the CARES Act. We gave them billions and billions and billions of dollars, and now they want to come and lecture us on how we do elections, and then come up here and beg for more money?”

The corporate welfare hit appeared in a somewhat different form in a passionate bylined op-ed for Fox Business.

“Your latest attempts to hurt Georgia’s economy will help us do something that is long overdue — make corporate welfare a thing of the past. There will be no number of well-connected lobbyists you can hire to save you. There will be no amount of donations you can make that will save you. There will be nowhere for you to hide,” Scott warned.