FM Talk 1065 Podcasts
U.S. Sen. Rick Scott - Jeff Poor Show - Wednesday 7-31-24
[Music] Welcome back to the Jeff Force show that the talk will go 6-5. They just stay with us on this Wednesday morning. Text line 251343 0106 would be in touch with the program. All you got to do is hit us up on the text line real quick. Still to come on the program by an hour from now from Newstalk 93.1 in Montgomery, Joey Clark, and then we have administrative while attorney John Moore Smith coming up in the 11 o'clock hour, so stay tuned for that. But joining us now is my pleasure to introduce my next guest from our friends over nearby Florida, United States Senator Scott joins us on the line. Senator, good morning. How are you? Good morning. I think it's just a thought up here that is down there. It's muggy, I guess, and as you know, be it for Florida. The humidity is what gets us. Senator, we'll talk about big picture stuff in a moment, but I got to watch it yesterday during the Secret Service, the acting Secret Service Director's hearing. I mean, there's still just it just looks like a lot of obfuscation, a lot of things that they're not willing to give just straight up answers to about the attempted assassination. I forget it. What they're doing to themselves is they're making the public feel like they're to cover up. Think about this. When somebody doesn't give you information, what's your first reaction? Wonder what they're hiding. That's exactly what they're doing. There's been 18 days, no press conferences. What should be happening is, what I did, I had two big night shootings in Florida, the Pulse Night Club shooting in Orlando, the Still Marjory Simmons Douglas School in Parkland, and when that happened, every day, two or three times a day, I had a press conference with local state instead of law enforcement. We answered everybody's question, so no one ever thought that there was a cover-up. What's happening now is, 18 days in, they can't answer some basic questions. They don't want to talk to the press. What they're doing to themselves is they're making people feel like, "Oh gosh, there's something to hide here." The truth on Sunday, as an example, I got asked, "Hey, do you think there was a second shooter?" I don't think there's a second shooter, but guess what? They're still that right away. They know exactly where the bullets came from, so they should be able to do it and they're not. If this doesn't make sense to me, I don't know why they're doing this to themselves. The other thing is, there's no accountability so far, it makes no sense. Think about this, if there's a local law enforcement shooting in Florida, it's probably true around the country. What happens is that person, you know, once there's anything long, they go on it administratively. We have the state police or department law enforcement do it independent investigation, and then if there's no problem, they go back to their legal duties. In this case, we have no idea if they're responsible with the next Trump rally or the next terrorist rally. We don't know. I think the service is a great job. If people look at the service hiding that, they're great. FBI, they're great. They're great. Leadership is lacking from that someone's standpoint of transparency. Yeah, and like I said, did they operate on this need to know basis? I don't think that they understand the need. They don't appreciate it, I guess. Maybe they understand it, but like you said, people are going to kind of come up with their own explanations for things if they're not up front and more transparent. And I think that's just bad government. Yeah. How is that good for them? It's good. I tell you, it's not good for government, right? So even in their standpoint, they've lost credibility, and every time I talk to the leadership at the FBI, it's on the same thing. When you guys go do things and you don't tell the public and bring the public along, why do you think the public's going to think? Yeah. And here we are today. Do you anticipate this, Senator? Will we ever fully know the circumstances? I mean, here's what it looks like that there's a lot of unanswered questions that people kind of got their ideas about what's going on, but it's sort of a CYA thing that are a blame shifting thing, and no one really wants to take responsibility here, either they may be rhetorically, but that's maybe what's really going on here. Will you ever fully know the entirety of the circumstances here? I'm going to do everything I can to get the information out. The public deserves it. I mean, the guy that is the leading Republican candidate almost was killed. The public person was almost killed, right? This doesn't happen every day in our life. It's not like this is normal. This is supposed to be never, right? If that had happened, what would happen in the country, no one knows. But we are political leaders have to be safe, so they've got to take this seriously, and when they make the decision, they're not going to tell those things, they're not taken seriously. So I'm going to do everything I can to make sure the public knows I'm going to talk about this every day that they've got to be doing a press count. So let's move on to the election. Despite what's happened, and your former colleague there, Kamala Harris, now the top of the ticket for the Democrats, I think maybe slightly, and things have improved for Democrats, but you look at the top of the ticket all the way down, and said it's absolutely within reach. So how are you feeling about November? Well, the only update incumbent senators, the only two that have competitive races, are Ted Cruz and Nate. So we just got to raise their money, get our boat out, and we can win. We're going to win West Virginia, so that would put us at 50-50. Then we've got a great chance in Montana, Ohio, Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and others. So if we, if it's, you know, people want change, if our candidates run good races, then I think we have a chance to have a significant majority in the Senate, but I think we're going to get a majority. Nothing's ever, you know, easy, right? But we have good candidates, but you know, I don't know which one is probably our 51, you could argue Montana or Ohio, could be Sam Brown out in Nevada or Kerry Lake, the great candidates. So I'm optimistic. The country wants change, I can see it in sort of, is a travel state in my reelection campaign. People want change. They know that we can't keep going down the path of going down. It's not, it's not working, it's not, and it's not good for our families. I grew up in a poor family, I live in public housing, but happening to poor families today in our country is so unfair because, you know, the inflation is just to wreck their lives, their wages are not dead with inflation. This is totally unfair. The, in, in your right, I, you get the sense that, I mean, Democrats, these last, now, look, the Republicans have had the House and that's a whole different story, but Democrats will just send it in, and the presidency and, I mean, it's, they got this weird thing going on right now with J.D. Vance and attacking him and trying to, like, I guess, re-establish Kamala Harris is, you know, something different than what she is, but they don't really have like a winning track record here at all. I mean, it seems like it'd be shooting fish in a barrel to run against them. Well, the problem they have is that they have a record. The, you know, now Harris is going to act like she wasn't a border czar. She'll probably say she wasn't vice president and then shot the actual thing. She never got Joe Biden. That's what she's going to try to do. But reality is, is that the public realizes the democratic agenda is a bad agenda. They've all supported it. If they have a vote on it, they've supported it. They've supported open borders. They've sort of mapped it to spending in this cause inflation. They've supported a work military. That's not what the country wants. And so as long as, you know, Republicans, we explained who the Democrats are, I know some guys who had campaign up now, explained who Biden, who, uh, Harris is. Well, as we explained it, the American public is smart. I think we'll, we'll get the House bill by House in the Senate. I ask you to play pundit here, but I mean, as far as these last couple of weeks with a new candidate at the top of the ticket for the Democrats, I think the Trump guys, they've done a fairly decent job kind of staying out of the way here, letting this sort of play out. And then once things really, really settle down, and then this impacts the entire ticket, then will they reassess it from there and proceed accordingly? Yeah, I think they've done a good job. I think Trump's doing a great race. He clearly, everybody knows he's a fighter. Everybody knows he wants to, uh, you know, to, you know, make this country great again. Um, so, you know, I'm, I'm actually very optimistic. Now, uh, the internal politics of the United States Senate, let's talk about that. Obviously, uh, you got to need a, a new leader of the, uh, the Republican caucus there. You're bid for that. Talk a little bit about that. And, and what, what, like, what needs, what, what direction do Republicans in the Senate need to go in? And there seems to be, I mean, you know, you have, um, you have the Ted Cruz's and the grandpa's and that wing, our friend, Tommy Tuberville. Uh, and then you have sort of the guys who've been there a while, kind of, kind of talk about like the Senate and Republicans and really what, where they need to, how they fit into the puzzle. So, you know, the question is going to be, are we going to get changed, right? Do we want to change the direction of the Senate? We, I don't think, you know, we've been doing what, um, the, um, you know, with the public ones, we've got a great Republican party and if you look at the leadership up here, uh, with these massive spending bills, um, infrastructure bills, it's not what, it's not what our Republican voters want. And so I'm running on a campaign to change the direction. We didn't get a big change in leadership up here. We can't have, uh, a little bit changed just because McConnell's leaving. We can't go back and run the place like McConnell has because we're actually not getting results. Look at where $35, $30 of the debt, uh, we got massive inflation where, you know, you can't, you can't say under this leadership that, you know, Republican principles have been, uh, part of the equation because they haven't. Uh, so I'm running on the teaching. Uh, it's a, both of whoever is serving in the Senate, be into this, at the end of this election cycle. I think, um, I think people are going to vote for change, but you know, it's, it's a election. I'm going to make sure that people know that what I stand for. And I, I think we ought to be able to represent our state. And we ought to fight like helpful how to improve, you know, Alabama and Florida and whatever state you represent. Well, we talk about policy. I mean, maybe we could hit some specifics here. Like, oh, is there, is there sort of a checklist here? You got, is you're at least thinking about what, what needs to be done in this country? You know, what's Republicans, there's the quest to, to win these elections. And we saw this in 2016. And then they wanted to send it. They wanted the house and they had the White House and it kind of felt like walking in quicksand. What, what changes this time? Well, um, I think, well, first of all, I think Trump is going to walk in. He had, he had to experience healthy and present. He's going to walk in with a very, uh, aggressive agenda, which had to be great. Um, but we have to start doing what you do in business. I'm a business guy. I don't business is all my life. In a business, you live in a reality and you go to solve problems. So we know that, um, places out of control, that's when we get back, fixed by bouncing our budget. We know the borders secured. That's when we're going to get fixed by actually securing the borders. We know we have a world military that, that's going to require leaders that are not focused on being woke up or something in the lethal. Um, we, we've got a lot of problems and we're going to have to get leadership that says, you know what, we're going to fit in the room and we're going to take as much time as it takes to come through the conclusion to fix the problems of the country. And I'm actually optimistic that that's, uh, what's going to happen. That's what I did when I was a governor of Florida. We are walking with a big budget deficit. I balanced the budget. That was not easy. Um, I said I get 7,000 jobs. We actually added 1.7 million jobs my eight years because we worked at the private sector to go jobs. It's most important that you do for somebody is get them self-sufficiency. So I'm actually optimistic that we can do it, but it's going to take a complete sea change in how this place is going. Talk about Florida. I mean, you know, during the Obama years, it was sort of swing state, but I, I mean, I look at it and I look at what you and your colleague, Marco Rubio, you as governor. Uh, and then your successor there with Ron DeSantis. I mean, it's, it's really showing as a, it's serving as a blueprint for the GOP. This, this is how you take a kind of precarious situation and you get it on the right track. But I think that people, I mean, if we, if we elect governors, um, that do what the voters want, and I think typically we'll hear what people want. They want a good economy. They don't want inflation. They want a great education system for the kids because that's their future. They want to be safe. And whether that's safe is because the federal level of their US military, right, the state levels, because of primarily local law enforcement, that's what they want out of government. They don't want government to dictate their lives. I mean, I was told by, I love my mom. She's a wonderful person. Um, they, she taught me, you know, so many wonderful things, but I didn't like being told what to do. I don't think we need government to tell how to lead our lives. And so we've got, if you do that, then you guess what, people are going to vote for you. They're going to say, you know, a couple of leadership is pretty good. Let's, let's keep doing that. And so we've taken Florida and I got elected as governor in 2010. We had 568,000 more Democrat voters than Republican voters registered. And now we have 950,000 more Republican. And I think what's happened is they said, you know what, there's Republican leadership work. And so we're going to, we're going to get more of that. People moved to our state because they know in Florida, you have the end of your screen. You're not going to have government dictate your life. Centering been very kind to make time for this audience just more than best of luck to you. And hopefully we could talk to you again sometime. But once again, thanks for coming on the program this morning. I take care of my wife, my mobile. So you have a beautiful state. You're very kind to say that. As a Senator, Eric Scott there, we got to get a break in here. We will be right back. This is the Jet Force show. What if it talked, 106 five. [Music]