On this date in 2014, 2015, 20162017, 2018, as well as 2019, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day posted profiles of Florida Governor Rick Scott, who may or may not be a skeleton dipped in wax and given life. While still the CEO of a health insurance company that was caught illegally gouging the public on billing, Scott had to plead the Fifth Amendment a staggering 75 times to help himself avoid prosecution, as the company, HCA, was smacked with the largest fine in a fraud settlement case in United States history. His leadership in running Florida has been as equally questionable, with Scott cutting government funding to state run hospitals, education, and welfare whenever possible. He lost the state a mint’s worth of taxpayer money on a quest to drug test people on welfare that found statistically minimal drug use compared to the national average (go figure, poor people can’t afford drugs), and was eventually thrown out as an unconstitutional violation of the 4th Amendment by the courts. Gov. Scott has had ethics investigators breathing down his neck almost his entire tenure, as his friends and donors get lucrative government contracts, and that he failed to disclose his personal assets during campaign finance reports (he’s worth somewhere between $200 and $340 million). By December 2014, media investigations started to reveal that Scott’s decision to outsource prison medical care to Corizon Health for $1.2 billion had additional fees… the cost of over 660 malpractice lawsuits from shoddy care it provided Florida inmates that left as many as 30 people dying a month.
Two months later, in February 2015, Scott is handed three more lawsuits that accuse his administration of widespread corruption, including his previous failure to disclose his finances while running for office, and a refusal to obey transparency laws, particularly over the firing of the former executive director of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement Gerald Bailey, who Scott wanted to replace with party loyalists (when the FDLE is supposed to be non-partisan). From there, a series a lies and cover-ups started shaking out, including a time where Gov. Scott was claiming Bailey resigned (as if he wasn’t going to correct him). Scott and the state of Florida settle these lawsuits in August at a cost of $700,000 to taxpayers. He also managed to revamp the state’s unemployment system, and wouldn’t you know it, he botched the $77 million overhaul of that completely as well. And it was a deliberate sabotage, at that.
The only reason this Voldemort-with-rhinoplasty didn’t get impeached is because Florida election law makes it nigh-impossible to impeach or recall a governor, and the people are opting to just wait him out.
Rick Scott also is prone to tantrums, like when he refused to take the stage during the 2014 debates for Florida governor because his opponent, Charlie Crist, had a fan under his podium to blow cool air at his crotch (seriously) or the time Gov. Scott tried heading into a local Starbucks for some coffee, a woman spotted him, told him how choices he’d made had cut her Medicaid funding, and she shamed him for it, not taking his comeback of “creating jobs” before calling him an “***hole”. Now, normally, CSGOPOTD doesn’t make much of hecklers politicians might get… but it’s how you react to them that counts. And Rick Scott, no lie… released an attack ad against the woman, calling her “a terribly rude woman,” a “latte liberal” and someone who “clearly has a problem.” And perhaps most Mr. Burns-like of any of his actions was how Scott adopted a rescue dog that he named “Reagan” during his 2010 election to look like a real softie, and then reporters realized it wasn’t ever around and started to ask about it… only to finally have his staff admit that Scott had “gotten rid” of the dog because it “acted too crazy”, and that they, to this day, have no idea what fate befell the poor canine.
In 2018, Rick Scott was term-limited as Governor of Florida, and Donald Trump started pressuring Scott to run for U.S. Senate the middle of relief efforts after Hurricane Irma (that’s tacky, but that’s Trump). While most sane people should realize the last person you should take advice from is Donald Trump, Rick Scott figured he and the Florida GOP gerrymandered elections there enough to win statewide office twice already, so he challenged off Democratic Senator Bill Nelson in 2018. Going into the final weeks of the campaign, though, the headlines in Florida are a constant reminder of how corrupt and incompetent Rick Scott was for 8 years, whether its gun control advocates who survived the Parkland shooting campaigning against his election to the Senate, Scott being rebuffed for trying to pack the Florida Supreme Court before leaving office, red tides and green slime algae manifesting as a testament to his negligence on the environment, (and yes, his decisions did pave the way for this ecological disaster) or watching him try to distance himself from Donald Trump especially after a lackluster response from FEMA and the Scott administration after Hurricane Michael.
And much as we’ve discussed over the past several years, Rick Scott is a coward, and continues to be one now that he’s been elected to the U.S. Senate, whether in being unable to grow enough of a backbone to stand against Donald Trump after his racist attacks on four Congresswomen, or even seeing Scott try and defend Trump after he admitted to a quid pro quo in the Ukraine whistleblower scandal. And of course, Rick Scott voted against witnesses in the impeachment trial (thus making it a “trial”), and then voted to acquit Donald Trump so he could go back to not paying any attention to the looming threat of Covid-19. He’s far enough up Trump’s ass that he echoed concerns that counting all ballots cast by mail by Election Day would be unnecessary, and he actually drafted legislature to try and leave potentially hundreds of thousands, if not millions uncounted.
Y’know, back to Covid-19 and Rick Scott… he is too stupid to realize that when you test POSITIVE for it, that would be a bad thing. What he thinks would truly be terrible, though, is if people got any more Covid-19 stimulus money, because the uber-rich Sen. Scott thinks that economic relief might make Americans “lazy”. (How about, “f**** you”, Rick?)
Florida, as a state, keeps electing this reptilian jagoff, and we can’t begin to understand why. We’ll see if they’ve become wise to his con-man ways when he’s up for re-election in 2022.
