“The governor doesn’t understand there is a State Constitution and that we have three branches of government,” said State Senator Mike Fasano, a Republican from New Port Richey who upset Mr. Scott with rough handling of his staff during a testy committee hearing. “They are talking about the attitude that he is still the C.E.O. of his former health care corporation, and that is not going to work in this state, in Tallahassee, in my district. The people believe in three branches of government.”
Republican lawmakers in Florida were hoping for a smoother transition. Instead, they say, they got top-down management from a political novice.
With the Legislature convening on Tuesday for a potentially arduous two-month session that is bound to usher in major cuts in spending and jobs and radical changes to education, pensions, unemployment benefits and Medicaid, the governor will be tested on a broader, more public scale. Florida faces an estimated $3.6 billion budget shortfall this year and has a stubborn 12 percent unemployment rate.
“I think there have been some understandable growing pains because government doesn’t function like a corporation,” said Speaker Dean Cannon, a Republican from central Florida, taking a more measured tone than Mr. Fasano.
“I like Governor Scott a lot as a person and a leader,” Mr. Cannon said. “I think he’s going through the understandable adjustment of the transition from campaigning to governance.”
Suck it up, Florida GOP. Rick Scott is everything you said you wanted in a state chief executive: a business tycoon who was going to run the state according to the free market principles you hold near and dear. Now that you're finding out that means all Floridians who aren't making bank have their necks on the block as Scott will gut education, prisons and Medicaid to eliminate the state's corporate income tax by 2018, you're recoiling in horror.
And yet that's exactly what Democrats said Scott would do. He's planning to "balance" a $3.8 billion budget hole with $4 billion plus in property tax cuts and corporate income tax cuts...and then some $8 billion plus in spending cuts, including taking some 3 million Floridians off Medicaid and making them the federal government's problem, cutting billions from Florida schools, and eliminating 8,000 state jobs, and that's for starters.
Republicans in the state see this for what it is: political suicide that they are being asked to participate in, and they want zero part of it. But you wanted Governor Galt and baby, you got him in spades.
Reap what you sow, gentlemen. Too bad millions of Floridians have to reap that whirlwind as well to literally eliminate taxes on the corporate class. Because that's all that matters to Rick Scott.
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