Rick Scott plotting how to wreck Ron DeSantis — so he can run for president himself

DeSantis keeps waging culture wars as more GOP critics emerge.

DeSantis’ actions of recent weeks came as his star is rising among conservative voters, simultaneously triggering a round of criticism from other potential contenders in the 2024 GOP presidential sweepstakes.

Critics argue he is failing to address the real issues facing Floridians, including their being priced out of the housing market to having their insurance canceled.

“When did ‘woke’ become part of our conversation, part of our lexicon? What does it even mean?” asked Barbara Petersen, executive director of the Florida Center for Governmental Accountability, a nonpartisan open government watchdog. “There are big problems in the state he is not dealing with.”

The former president is reportedly fixated on DeSantis, and is planning a new strategy of using Ron’s past missteps to end the Florida Republican's dream of becoming the party's standard bearer.

All of this makes one man giddy

Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee for the 2022 midterm cycle, has ambitions of running for president — and he is considering a plan to tear down one of his most bitter rivals: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

DeSantis, who holds the office Scott himself once occupied in Florida, has become a favorite of the D.C. Republican donor class, who view him as a potential alternative to another run by former President Donald Trump — and at least some polls have suggested he led Trump with Republican primary voters.

"The beef between Scott and DeSantis has been thoroughly documented in all its pettiness and vaingloriousness: the last-minute appointments by Scott, the dueling inaugurals, the party he threw in the governor’s mansion on the day that DeSantis’s young family moved into the residence," reported Palmieri. "At the time, of course, DeSantis was just a 30-something largely unknown figure who narrowly defeated a hyper-liberal candidate, Andrew Gillum. Over the intervening years, Scott has developed a different narrative regarding DeSantis’s success—namely, that he piggybacked on his own achievements, such as lowering unemployment from 11 percent to 3 percent, reducing the deficit, and cutting taxes. His team is particularly piqued by the lack of gratitude. Just this month, after DeSantis’s resounding re-election, Scott skipped his second inaugural address."

According to the report, Scott is already considering some lines of attack he might use against DeSantis if the both of them were in a presidential primary.

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"Scott views the DeSantis administration, I’m told, as overly focused on culture war piñatas rather than fiscal issues," wrote Palmieri. "When Scott rode into the governor’s mansion in 2010 thanks to his checkbook and a Tea Party wave, he defeated party favorite Bill McCollum by zeroing in on his abuse of government perks, like availing himself of the state jet while he was Florida’s attorney general. I’ve heard that he would similarly try to frame DeSantis as a taxpayer-mooching grifter who is worth $300,000 while still carrying student loans, and who asked the state legislature to buy his office a $15 million private jet. (As a sign of belt-tightening, Scott sold all three of the state’s jets. After all, he had his own.) The two would also compete for the Florida donor network, which Scott has impeccably maintained."

Even The Wall Street Journal Now Call Republicans ‘Masochists’

A new proposal coming from the House Republicans who have taken over the chamber after the midterm election is setting off alarm bells with members of the conservative Wall Street Journal's editorial board.

Now that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has finally been sworn in and work has begun, members of the majority caucus are rushing to pass proposals they have been sitting on and a bill being forwarded by Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA) could come back to haunt the GOP when the 2024 election rolls around.

As the editors point out, Republicans can't seem to stop shooting themselves in the foot with unpopular m bills that will become fodder for future Democratic attack ads.

Calling the GOP caucus "masochists," the editors cautioned House Republicans to kill Carter's bill that would create national sales tax among other changes before it reaches a floor vote or suffer the consequences later.

Beginning, "Rule No. 1 in the legislative handbook is to make your opponent take the tough votes, but House Republicans may be reading it backwards. They’re set to vote on a national sales tax that won’t become law but will give Democrats a potent campaign issue," the editors added, "The point is that a consumption tax might make sense if Congress were writing the tax code from scratch. But it isn’t, and we could end up with both a national income and sales tax, the later of which could evolve over time into a value-added tax."

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Noting that the same proposal has been made before -- only to flop -- the editors pointed out that it will get a hearing due to a promise McCarthy made to Freedom Caucus members as he struggled to win their votes for speaker.

That promise they state is a big mistake.

"Democratic Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Don Beyer have chimed in on Twitter to call the tax a death blow to middle-class pocketbooks," they wrote. "These attacks don’t take much imagination when inflation is running hot, and the Fair Tax has hurt GOP candidates before. When tea party Republicans ran on the idea in 2010, Democratic groups ran ads that blasted the sales tax but ignored the other tax cuts."

They added, "The tax issue is a rare GOP advantage these days, and Republicans would be crazy to squander it with a Fair Tax vote," and then suggested, "If Mr. Carter and other supporters insist on a masochistic vote, the GOP could invoke the Freedom Caucus’s demand for 'regular order' and kill the Fair Tax in the Ways and Means Committee."