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By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, November 11, 2024

 

I have no idea to what extent the Rick-Scott-must-be-Senate-majority-leader-or-else! movement is a real thing, rather than the expression of an online spat, but, regardless, some of the claims being made in Scott’s favor seem hilariously unsound to me.

 

Leave aside for a moment that it is absolutely grotesque to see anyone who wishes to lead a separate branch of government promising that they will diminish that branch’s power to please another branch — which, if you strip away all the confetti, is exactly what Trump is demanding — and look at the dull facts. Since last night, I’ve seen it widely asserted that John Cornyn shouldn’t win the role of Senate majority leader because he has supported gun-control in the past. Which . . . yeah, he has. I opposed that — and vehemently. But so has Rick Scott. In 2018, he signed a bill in Florida to raise the age of gun ownership to 21. In response, the NRA refused to endorse him in his Senate run, and sued to stop the law from going into effect. In 2019, Scott came out in favor of “red-flag laws.” Why is that different? Why doesn’t that make Scott an irredeemable squish?

 

And why, while we’re at it, does Trump get a pass for his own heresy? In 2018, Trump issued an executive order to ban bump stocks. And a few months before that, he abandoned the fight for a national concealed-carry reciprocity law and instead backed an effort to strengthen the background-check system that was spearheaded by . . . John Cornyn. Politics is complicated — so complicated, in fact, that these sorts of litmus tests ought to be used sparingly. But if we’re going to have them, they ought at least to be consistently applied.

 

Oh, and while I’m annoying everyone: I’ve also seen a great deal of criticism of Mitch McConnell. This is misplaced. McConnell is not perfect, but he has been one of the most effective Republican politicians of the last 50 years, and is one of the key reasons that the Supreme Court is where it is, that Trump got his tax cuts through, and that the Obama administration was repeatedly thwarted after 2010. He’ll be missed when he’s gone.