Rick Scott in The Party's Over, by Charlie Crist

On Health Care: Lead plaintiff in lawsuit to overturn healthcare reform

There was one issue that Rick Scott could never seem to get away from: Obamacare, the president's still controversial plan. He hated it, hated it, hated it!

He'd entered politics, after all, as a major funder of anti-Obamacare TV ads. Before and after becoming governor, he rarely missed an opportunity to claim that the Affordable Care Act would kills jobs, bankrupt America, and--who knows?--maybe even cause halitosis. At his direction, the state was a lead plaintiff in a lawsuit trying to overturn the president's reforms. The suit got all the way to the US Supreme Court. And Rick kept popping up on conservative talk shows, warning that expanding Medicaid, a key Obamacare provision, would put too big a strain on Florida taxpayers. At one point, he asserted that the Medicaid expansion would cost $26 billion over the next decade, although the state's health care agency slashed the estimate to $3 billion after the governor's math was challenged.

Source: The Party's Over, by Charlie Crist, p.308-309 Feb 4, 2014

On Local Issues: Opposed $2.4B federal funding of I-4 corridor

For almost 3 decades, Florida had been discussing high-speed rail [and we had finally negotiated a deal]: state-of-the-art trains racing along the median strip of Interstate 4 at 170 miles an hour between Tampa, Lakeland, and Orlando. Did I mention the feds were paying for everything? Yes, everything.

On February 16, 6 weeks after taking office, the new governor announced he was rejecting the entire $2.4 billion. Every last cent of it. "This project would be far too costly to taxpayers, and I believe the risk far outweighs the benefits," he said.

Republicans in the Florida Legislature were shaking their heads. 26 state senators, a veto-proof majority and a rare coalition of Republicans and Democrats, signed a letter to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood rebuking the new Tea Party governor and asking the US Department of Transportation to send the funds anyway. "Politics should have no place in the future of Florida's transportation," the senators wrote.

Source: The Party's Over, by Charlie Crist, p.303-5 Feb 4, 2014

On Principles & Values: OpEd: reversed bipartisanship and excluded Democrats

Rick Scott didn't only bring a new administration to Tallahassee on January 4, 2011. He also arrived with a wrecking ball. He'd barely unpacked his toothbrush and his custom-made, Florida-seal cowboy boots when he got busy knocking down some of our proudest achievements. Rolling back consumer protections. Reversing the progress on voting rights. Signaling to the oil drillers, utilities, and insurance companies that Florida was open season again. In Tallahassee, the whole tone changed. The bipartisanship that had been such a hallmark of the past 4 years evaporated with the first morning dew. Democrats were still welcome to their opinions--but no one in power had any interest in listening to them. Teachers, minorities, women's groups, and anyone else suspected of being even faintly Democratic--they were back on the please-don't-bother-us list. Only I don't believe too many people in the new administration were saying "please." Source: The Party's Over, by Charlie Crist, p.301 Feb 4, 2014

The above quotations are from The Party's Over: How the Extreme Right Hijacked the GOP and I Became a Democrat by Charlie Crist. Click here for other excerpts from The Party's Over: How the Extreme Right Hijacked the GOP and I Became a Democrat by Charlie Crist. Click here for other excerpts by Rick Scott. Click here for other excerpts by other Governors.
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