GOP senator opposes Trump impeachment trial because it doesn't create jobs

Sen. Rick Scott believes that trying Donald Trump for insurrection is a waste of time because it will not create jobs — or help law enforcement.

Hours after voting to reject the House of Representative’s second impeachment of Trump without even holding a trial on Tuesday, the Florida Republican argued that accountability for the former president’s recent actions was “backward looking.”

“It does nothing to help an American family,” he told Fox News. “It doesn’t have anything to do with job creation, improving our schools, our military, our law enforcement. So it’s just political theater for the Democrats.”

A bipartisan majority in the House of Representatives impeached Trump earlier this month — his record-setting second impeachment — on charges of “incitement of insurrection.”

Trump spent two months spreading false claims that the 2020 election had been stolen and that he, not President Joe Biden, was the real winner. He encouraged his followers to protest Congress’ certification of Biden’s Electoral College victory, tweeting, “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” He spoke at a rally that day, encouraging a mob of his angry supporters to march to the Capitol building.

As rioters later attacked the Capitol, Trump released a video praising them and telling them, “We love you.”

Scott too has been under fire for his role in fomenting the Capitol insurrection and for his vote to reject the 2020 election results.

The Orlando Sentinel’s editorial board slammed him as “unfit for office” and an enemy of democracy who “brought shame” on his office and Florida.

The South Florida Sun Sentinel editorial board called Scott a “villain” who “fostered the subversive fiction that the presidential election wasn’t fair and honest” and “helped Trump seriously sabotage the public’s faith in our government.”

Scott’s view that accountability is unimportant because it does not create jobs was not on display after his narrow November 2018 victory over then Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL). Days after that election, he demanded an investigation into non-existent “rampant fraud” in and “incompetence” in two Democratic-leaning counties.

“I will not sit idly by while unethical liberals try to steal this election from the people of Florida,” Scott said.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.