Voting for Trump’s election lies may cost Scott dearly

TALLAHASSEE — Sen. Rick Scott is wearing his Navy cap and he’s on YouTube telling that lie about Democrats being socialists, so he sounds worried. Let’s hope so.

The Florida senator is the new chairman of the Senate Republicans’ political arm, so it’s his job to flip the Senate back to the GOP in 2022. Yes, it was just last week that Democrats gained their slim working majority with those two huge victories in Georgia. But when it comes to raising money and winning elections, Scott does not like to waste time.

“They obviously don’t like me much,” says Scott, tongue in cheek (I think), on a video about his colleagues, “because I now have to figure out how to raise roughly a gazillion dollars in order to retake the U.S. Senate.”

Scott is right where he wants to be. He’ll crisscross the country for two years collecting checks from donors and IOUs from senators who need his help to win, and he’ll ask them to repay the debt when he runs for president in 2024.

What will make Scott’s job harder is that a slew of big corporations are suspending campaign contributions to politicians who voted not to certify the election result for Joe Biden. Scott is the only member of the Senate GOP inner circle on that noxious list, so the companies can’t write checks to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. The list includes AT&T, American Express, Amazon, Comcast, Disney, Marriott, the Motion Picture Association and Walmart, and there likely will be more.

“Members of Congress had an opportunity to unite — an opportunity that some, sadly, refused to embrace,” Disney said in an obvious reference to Scott and seven other senators who subverted the will of the people of Pennsylvania. Disney’s dissing of Scott is especially noteworthy, because it’s such a big player in Florida politics. But this shows the damage Scott caused with his vote to prop up Donald Trump and his riotous mob, after they trashed the U.S. Capitol and threatened to kill members of Congress.

Still, the corporations’ refusal to open their checkbooks seems symbolic. It’s inconceivable that these business behemoths would sit out an entire election cycle. Besides, history is on Scott’s side. In a new president’s first midterm election, the party in power usually loses ground.

But getting to a gazillion will be more of a challenge without all that corporate money. It would be one of the great ironies in the history of American politics if Scott, who used his vast personal fortune to buy his way into the Governor’s Mansion twice and then into the Senate, becomes the catalyst for removing millions of dollars from politics — all because of his loyalty to Trump.

This is why it’s so important that the Senate move forward with Trump’s impeachment trial. Scott must be forced to take a stand on a disgraced and twice-impeached president and his hateful mob one last time.

There are 34 Senate seats up next year. Republicans, including Florida’s Marco Rubio, have to defend 20, and Democrats 14. Three seats held by retiring Republicans will be open, which improves the Democrats’ chances, and all three are in big, expensive battleground states: North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

In Florida, Scott won three statewide general elections in eight years by extremely close margins. He knows how to win, and he’s where he is today because just enough Florida voters overlooked his checkered financial past at a hospital empire that committed massive Medicare fraud. His razor-thin wins for governor in 2010 and 2014 laid the foundation for a 10,000-vote cliffhanger over Bill Nelson in 2018.

On the YouTube video, a swaggering Scott dares Democrats to come after him. “There are two things I don’t do,” he says. “I don’t waste money, and I don’t lose elections.”

It’s time for Rick Scott to lose for a change. He tried to throw out the votes of 3.5 million Pennsylvanians on the flimsy rationale that the state changed its election procedures during the pandemic, something Florida did too. Scott needs to pay a price.