Last month, Senator Rick Scott released an “11-Point Plan to Rescue America.” In addition to proposals like, “finish building the wall, and name it after President Donald Trump,” the Florida Republican insisted that in order to save the country, we must tax all Americans, including people who literally make no money (“All Americans should pay some income tax to have skin in the game, even if a small amount”) and consider getting rid of programs created by federal legislation, like Medicaid and Medicare, which keep the poor and elderly alive (“All federal legislation sunsets in five years. If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again.”)
To give you an idea of how wildly unpopular these ideas are, Senator minority leader Mitch McConnell—never known for being a fan of the social safety net or non-rich—publicly ripped the plan in early March, saying, “If we’re fortunate enough to have the majority next year, I’ll be the majority leader. I’ll decide in consultation with my members what to put on the floor. Let me tell you what will not be on our agenda. We will not have as part of our agenda a bill that raises taxes on half the American people and sunsets Social Security and Medicare within five years. That will not be part of the Republican Senate majority agenda.”
So Scott probably should have had it in the back of his head that when he appeared on news programs to talk about anything, he might be asked about his “plan,” and a way to defend it, however indefensible it might be. But apparently, he did not!
Appearing on Fox News over the weekend to discuss Ukraine, the GOP lawmaker was pressed by host John Roberts about what exactly he was thinking when he put his “Plan to Rescue America” together. “That [plan] would raise taxes on half of Americans and potentially sunset programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security,” Roberts said. “Why would you propose something like that in an election year?”
At this point, it’s important to remember that Scott’s proposal states the very things Roberts asked about and that you can go to the senator’s website right now and see them, right there. Yet, absurdly, his response was to claim that the Fox News host was simply parroting liberal propaganda. “Sure, well, John, that’s of course the Democrat talking points,” Scott said.
“No, no! It’s in the plan!” Roberts told him, laughing at the ridiculousness of the answer. “It’s in the plan.”
Scott then went on to insist that no lawmaker would be willing to let Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security expire, and that instead his proposal would simply be forcing the conversation re: how to pay for them. As the Independent notes, he conveniently did not “address the central issue…of his plan forcing such programs to sunset unless the famously divided and deadlocked Senate could reach a compromise for their reauthorizations,” or the fact that, previously, “the Senate has let widely popular programs sunset after failing to reach compromises before, the most famous recent example being the Violence Against Women Act, which expired in 2019 and was not reauthorized until earlier this month.”
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