Rick Scott Points Finger At Pelosi Over Failure To Fund Government

 

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore/CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr

At a GOP press briefing on Wednesday, Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) called for a rejection of an omnibus government spending bill and instead pass a continuing resolution to fund the government after which the new Congress will work on the budget.

Sen. Rick Scott said:

What we want to have to happen is make sure that our military men and women will not continue to be discharged because of religious reasons or health reasons because they don't want to take the vaccine. That's an unbelievable win for military men and women.

Remember, the military is about military members, and we need to have all the equipment we need to have all these things, but without the men and women in the military, we can't get this done.

We still have to focus on the people that have been discharged; they need to be reinstated with back pay. These people have been injured, and this clearly doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense for them, and it doesn't make sense for our military.

You saw that we had Hurricane Ian just recently, so one of the individuals was one of the swimmers that saved people in that hurricane. Biden called him, and then they're discharging him. Biden called to thank him and say that this is a hero for saving people's lives, and then right after that, this guy's going to get discharged—that doesn't make any sense.

Another constituent has cancer, and he's trying to get a humanitarian reassignment to be closer to his father.

Only because he's not taking the vaccine, they will not allow him to do a reassignment, not because he's not qualified, not because of any of these things. So look, I'm glad it looks like in the NDAA that they're not going to discharge people for not taking the COVID. I'm disappointed that it's not in there that they're going to get reinstated with back pay.

We've got a—I think you should call it the Pelosi-Schumer spending bill—coming up. I've been up here four years and I've seen everything under the sun thrown in, and guess what? We all pay higher taxes, and we all see inflation rise. This has to stop, and this Congress has the ability to do it.

I'm on the budget committee; we could pass a budget, but we didn't stop and decided not to pass a budget, right? The Democrats made the decision not to pass the budget, so what we shouldn't be doing is passing a big Pelosi-Schumer spending bill without going through the budget process.

What we ought to do is do a short-term CR sometime into the next Congress and let the next Congress do their job and pass a real budget, and then let's go through the budget. So that's why I think we need to stop doing these ridiculous spending bills.