Sen. Rick Scott Puts McConnell in Crosshairs, Won’t Rule Out Bid for GOP Leader

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) addresses reporters following a weekly Republican policy luncheon as (L-R) Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), and Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) look on in the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Oct. 5, 2021. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said that Republican leaders in the Senate cost the GOP the majority because they caved to Democrats on legislation.

In an interview on Fox Business on Sunday, Scott said that he agreed with suggestions to postpone Republicans’ internal leadership elections. Those contests are scheduled for next week.

“The leadership in the Republican Senate says, ‘No, you cannot have a plan. We’re just going to run against how bad the Democrats are.’ Actually, they cave in to the Democrats,” Scott said on Sunday. “They want to rush through an election because they don’t want to do any assessment of what we’ve done wrong. Insanity is doing the exact same thing and thinking you’re going to get a different result. We won’t.”

Scott, who is currently in charge of the Senate campaign arm, would not rule out running for Senate GOP leader, he suggested on the Fox Business program.

“I’m not going to take anything off the table,” he said in response to a question from Fox’s Maria Bartiromo. He then pilloried Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who has long been the GOP leader in the upper chamber.

“Here’s what Mitch McConnell said when I put out my plan, he said we’re not going to have a plan,“ Scott said. ”We’re just going to talk about how bad the Democrats are. We can’t do that. We got to say what our ideas are and let’s fight over those ideas and let’s act like a caucus. We’ve got to start coming together as a caucus—not vote with the Democrats.”

Like Scott, other Republican senators, including Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), have reportedly circulated a letter calling to postpone the Republican leadership elections in the Senate.

“The old party is dead. Time to bury it. Build something new,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) wrote on Twitter. A day before, Hawley argued that “Washington Republicanism lost big Tuesday night.”

“When your ‘agenda’ is cave to Big Pharma on insulin, cave to [Sen. Chuck] Schumer on gun control & Green New Deal (‘infrastructure’), and tease changes to Social Security and Medicare, you lose,” the Missouri senator wrote.

And Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), a possible 2024 presidential candidate, wrote that “it makes no sense for Senate to have leadership elections before [the Georgia Senate] runoff.” That Twitter post came before outlets called the Nevada Senate race in favor Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), giving Democrats the majority in the chamber.

“We don’t yet know whether we’ll have a majority & Herschel Walker deserves a say in our leadership,” Cruz wrote, referring to the Republican nominee for the Senate in Georgia. “Critically, we need to hear a specific plan for the next 2 yrs from any candidate for leadership.”

Amid the recent GOP criticism of the Senate leadership, McConnell has not issued a public comment. The Epoch Times has contacted McConnell’s office for comment.