Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) on Tuesday unveiled an “11-point plan” detailing an array of ambitious policy goals that Republicans will pursue if they take control of Congress in November.
Scott said that the GOP will seek to challenge critical race theory in schools and replace it with a more patriotic curriculum.
“We will inspire patriotism and stop teaching the revisionist history of the radical left; our kids will learn about the wisdom of the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the founding fathers,” Scott writes.
“Public schools will ... not indoctrinate children with critical race theory or any other political ideology. No child will be taught they are inherently racist because of the color of their skin, or that some Americans are oppressors and others are oppressed,” Scott said.
Rather, Scott said, Republicans will pursue “color blind equality.”
“We are going to eliminate racial politics in America,” Scott wrote. “No government policy will be based on race. People ‘will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.’”
Republicans also hope to make sweeping changes to public safety and criminal policy.
Since the summer of 2020, violent crime rates across the United States have skyrocketed, with several major cities reaching record levels of murder.
Republicans and conservatives have blamed the crime surge on Democrats’ attitudes toward law enforcement, particularly in the wake of the “defund the police” movement. Scott called for an end to these efforts, saying that Republicans “will bring back respect for people who put their lives on the line to keep us safe.”
Under a GOP Congress, Scott says, “We will enforce our laws, all of them, and increase penalties for theft and violent crime. We will ... stop pretending that crime is OK. We have zero tolerance for ’mostly peaceful protests’ that attack police officers, loot businesses, and burn down our cities.”
Scott continued: “We will force prosecutors to prosecute. At present, many prosecutors in big cities are allowing criminals to go free with no justice, and they are doing it on purpose.”
Scott also demanded a return to Trump-era immigration policies.
“Countries have borders,” Scott said. “We will control ours and secure it, once and for all.”
Scott said that Republicans will seek to kindle economic growth and challenge socialistic policies by incentivizing the private sector and getting the federal government out of programs that can be better handled by state, local, or private entities.
“Socialism will be treated as a foreign combatant which aims to destroy our prosperity and freedom,” Scott said. “Other than essential core functions, government should not be doing anything that the private sector can do better and cheaper.”
To reduce the size of the federal government, Scott suggests federal laws should be “sunset” after five years, forcing Congress to reconsider legislation as situations evolve.
“If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again,” Scott explained.
Scott also said that Republicans will seek significant government reform.
“The permanent ruling class in Washington is bankrupting us with inflation and debt, so they must be removed,” Scott said in a call for a 12-year term limit on federal lawmakers, short of a compelling national security reason to go beyond that limit.
Further, Scott argued that government employees should be barred from making more than five times the national median income.
The next pillar on Scott’s GOP agenda would ensure “fair, fraud-free elections.”
“Today’s Democrat Party is trying to rig elections and pack the courts because they have given up on Democracy,” Scott wrote. “They don’t believe they can win based on their ideas, so they want to game the system and legalize voter fraud to stay in power.”
Republicans “won’t allow the radical left to destroy our democracy by institutionalizing dishonesty and fraud,” Scott vowed.
Scott said that Republicans will demand voter ID, ban “ballot harvesting,” and refuse to count ballots that are received after Election Day.
Scott’s next pillar promises to “protect, defend, and promote the American Family at all costs.”
To achieve this, Scott says that Republicans will work toward legislation to ensure that married couples don’t receive tax penalties over unmarried individuals, ending the so-called “marriage penalty” which in some states causes couples to pay more in taxes after their marriage than they did before.
Scott also discussed in depth how a GOP Congress would approach the fraught issues of abortion and gender.
Currently, many would-be parents are barred from adoption due to its high costs. Scott says that Republicans will work to lower these costs to make adoption easier and more accessible, and thereby to reduce abortion.
Scott said that Republicans will try to help single mothers avoid abortion by “paying all costs associated with carrying the child to term and placing the child for adoption.”
He said that a Republican Congress would be guided by science rather than ideology on abortion and gender issues.
“Humans are born male and female, there are two genders, and to deny that is to deny science,” Scott said, rejecting the notion that gender can be fluid or that one can change their gender.
Scott said that Republicans will seek to ban “gender-altering procedures” on minor children. “Once they become adults, they can do what they wish,” he added.
Scott also called for an end to practices allowing biological males—who have natural athletic advantages over women—to participate in women’s sports, leaving many women unable to effectively compete. The practice, Scott said, “is hugely unfair and would erase many of the gains women have made in athletics over the last 50 years.”
Scott also said that the GOP Congress would recognize as scientific fact that abortion is an act that kills human beings.
“Abortion kills human children,” Scott said. “To deny that is to deny science.”
Scott also says that a GOP Congress will work to fight big tech companies, which conservatives have long accused of left-wing bias.
“The Democrat Party and their Big Tech allies ... have virtually created a new religion of wokeness that is increasingly hostile toward people of faith, particularly Christians and Jews,” Scott wrote. “We will not be silenced, canceled, or told what words to use by the politically correct crowd.”
To take on Big Tech, Scott said that “All social media platforms that censor speech and cancel people will be treated like publishers and subject to legal action.”
This policy would be a fairly simple one to bring about.
Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act—one of the first efforts by Congress to regulate the burgeoning Internet—provides online platforms with protection from tort liability for content posted to their site as long as they do not pick and choose what one does and does not stay on the site.
President Donald Trump tried to revoke these protections, and Republicans have continued the effort since Trump left office.
If section 230 were repealed, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter would be subject to the same liability laws as news media outlets if they choose to censor certain viewpoints.
Finally, Scott says that a GOP Congress will be devoted to America First principles, popularized by Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign. These principles focus on policies that favor domestic manufacturing and production, keep jobs in the United States, and broadly serve the interests of American citizens over the citizens of other countries.
“America will be dependent on NO other country,” Scott said. “We will conduct no trade that takes away jobs or displaces American workers.”
As part of this pillar, Scott says that Republicans will reject “nation-building.”
Since George H. W. Bush’s presidency, the United States has taken on an increasingly police-like role in international affairs, scattering its troops across the globe and taking out leaders like Saddam Hussein that it considers distasteful. Scott calls for an end to this type of interventionism.
“Our military will not be used as a peace-keeping force,” Scott said. “It exists to protect us by intimidating or killing our enemies. Nation-building does not work, we will not waste our treasure or troops doing it.”
Scott laid out several distinct policies under each of his 11 pillars, but a broad image is clear from the various elements he lays out: Scott paints a picture of a Congress devoted to the growth of jobs, the shrinking of the federal bureaucracy, the protection of the borders, and color-blind law.
However, even if Republicans take the majority in the House and Senate, such wide-reaching reforms will be extremely difficult to carry out.
In the Senate, a Democrat minority could stop legislation that it dislikes using the filibuster, which requires two-thirds of the Senate to support ending debate on a bill before it comes to the floor. To overcome this, Republicans would need to either win a supermajority—an extremely rare occurrence in Senate history—or to abolish the filibuster, which Republicans have long been opposed to doing.
And even if they meet either of these conditions, a GOP Congress would have to convince President Joe Biden to sign off on their policies. This is unlikely, as Biden has made clear that he resolutely opposes many of the policies Scott calls for in the plan.
