Rick Scott, Marco Rubio and dubious legacy of Ed Gurney
Ed Gurney was a tank commander in Europe during World War II. He got his start in politics on the Winter Park City Commission and went on to become the first Republican senator from Florida since Reconstruction.
Despite those distinctions, history often remembers Gurney as Richard Nixon’s stooge on the Senate Watergate committee in 1973 and 1974, remaining so even as one sickening revelation after another brought Nixon’s political world crashing down.
In the final Watergate report, Gurney wrote that the conspiracy to rig the 1972 election was the work of “a few misguided individuals, overambitious and overzealous in their efforts on behalf of certain candidates and causes.”
Overzealous? That better describes football fans who rush the field after a win.
Forty-five years later, Florida’s current senators — Rick Scott and Marco Rubio — face a choice of legacies: Will they kowtow to an indefensible president like Ed Gurney did, or will they confront him head-on?
Scott was an early Trump adopter, writing favorably about him in a January 2016 USA Today column and becoming a loyal foot soldier after Florida’s Republican primary.
In fairness, Scott occasionally breaks with the president, as he did after Trump falsely claimed the Puerto Rico death toll following Hurricane Maria had been drummed up by Democrats; after Trump’s horrifying repudiation of American intelligence agencies in Helsinki; and (sort of ) after the president’s naive embrace of North Korea’s brutal dictator.
These disagreements typically are brief, tepid, even sheepish. Scott is so very careful not to poke the presidential bear.
Let’s review Scott’s July 28 performance on Meet the Press.
Asked about Donald Trump’s Twitter quest to further divide America along racial lines, in hopes it’ll help him get reelected, Scott couldn’t muster even a halfhearted criticism of the president.
“I, I, look, I didn’t do the tweets, Chuck, I can’t talk about why he did what he did,” Scott stammered in answer to a question from host Chuck Todd. Instead, Scott placed the blame on Maryland Sen. Elijah Cummings, the target of Trump’s Twitter attacks.
Scott was similarly soft-spined after Trump’s grotesque mishandling of the Charlottesville violence and after Trump attacked four women of color in Congress last month, telling them to go back to where they came from.
Rubio, at least on occasion, has been more forceful than Scott in denouncing Trump’s words.
“I think identity politics is a poison, it’s toxic,” Rubio said in a Miami Herald story of the attacks on the congresswomen. “I think that’s true when members of Congress practice it. But the presidency and the words of a president carry even greater weight in terms of the impact on society. The president shouldn’t have written that.”
Good. But then, a couple of days later, Rubio posted a video on Twitter in which he mocked the left for going “crazy with their outrage” and got huffy about being asked for a reaction to the president’s latest rants.
What exactly is wrong with that? Rubio’s an influential member of the U.S. Senate. When the president says or does something outlandish or inappropriate, he should expect to be asked about it.
Better yet, rather than waiting to be asked, Rubio should forcefully denounce when it happens the president’s lies, his name-calling, his abuse of office, his lack of statesmanship. It might demonstrate that Rubio hasn’t lost his independence, and make him more effective. It worked for John McCain.
Supporting the president’s policies on immigration or taxation is one thing. We don’t expect Florida’s senators to alter their policy positions just to teach Trump a lesson.
But staying silent — or at best, being mealy-mouthed — about this president’s behavior and abuses of office is another.
It is possible to walk and chew gum at the same time.
A day will come when this country moves on from Donald Trump, and history will take over from there.
Scott and Rubio have a choice to either be remembered as senators who stood up for policies and principles they believe in while also standing up to a corrupt president. Or they’ll go down as a pair of 21st century Ed Gurneys.
It isn’t too late to choose the first option.