Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Rick Scott are on the Republican shit list because, get this, they think the two are making Donald Trump look bad. As if Cheeto Benito needed that assist.
"Already anxious about Trump’s chances in the nation’s biggest swing state," Politico reports, "Republicans now are dealing with thousands of unemployed workers unable to navigate the Florida system to apply for help." Note that these Republicans are more concerned about blowback against Trump than they are about all those newly unemployed workers who can't make the overwhelmed system work and are going to have to start applying on paper.
And DeSantis and crew are very quick to point the finger. They didn't do this, it was all Rick Scott's fault from when he was governor. "It's a sh-- sandwich, and it was designed that way by Scott," one DeSantis advisor told Politico. "It wasn't about saving money. It was about making it harder for people to get benefits or keep benefits so that the unemployment numbers were low to give the governor something to brag about." That very expensive system Scott made was intended to limit benefits and reduce the unemployment taxes Florida businesses had to pay and to discourage people from getting the benefit to the greatest extent possible. That's not working out so well now, and making Florida Republicans eat their own.
Here's the chairman of the Republican Party for the state, talking about Scott and the system he created: "$77 million? Someone should go to jail over that." DeSantis' adviser keeps piling on. "Everyone we talk to in that office when we ask them what happened tells us, 'the system was designed to fail.' […] That's not a problem when unemployment is 2.8 percent, but it's a problem now. And no system we have can handle 25,000 people a day."
Again, the idea that this could tank Trump in Florida in 2020 is what's really got Republicans enraged. You'd think DeSantis and his team would do better to just get in and fix this, while telling the people of Florida that they'll have their backs. But they don't particularly care about the unemployed Floridians, not compared to what it means for Trump in November.
