As President-elect Donald Trump picks his cabinet, the Senate has its own choice: who will be the majority leader.
Whether we can expect the Senate to oppose or support deep state efforts to sabotage the Trump presidency will be decided by whether they choose Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL).
Other, more professional, pundits can and will say more about the other candidates.
I want to speak about who Rick Scott is as a man and a leader.
My daughter Meadow was murdered during the Parkland school shooting in 2018. Rick Scott was governor at the time.
I met so many politicians in the immediate aftermath and in the months and years since. So many weren’t quite real men. I’m not saying they were lizard people, just that you could tell they were transactional – you could tell they saw the father of a murdered high school girl as a prop, not as a man who had just suffered unfathomable loss.
Rick Scott spearheaded the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Public Safety Act, a bipartisan bill promoting school safety. He held the line with Republicans on important things like gun rights. And he also worked with Democrats to get some of their saner priorities into the bill and to gain broad support.
He also knew it was important to get to the bottom of what happened. So, he established the MSD Public Safety Commission, which examined every detail of what went wrong before and during that massacre. I do not doubt that the lessons learned there have saved countless lives.
You can ask any sheriff in Florida – Democrat or Republican – who is the first guy to call them in an emergency. It’s Rick Scott.
Rick Scott proved to me then that he is a great leader. He has proved to me ever since that he is a good man.
Scott has always stayed in touch with me and my family. He has had no political reason to do so. We just connected, and he just cared.
President Trump understands that loyalty is the most important political virtue. Especially today, if we have Republican leaders without loyalty to our president, his movement will be stopped by lobbyists and deep state interests. We saw it happen before with Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan.
We can’t let it happen again. America has given Donald Trump an astonishing mandate. Congress must work with and for him to deliver it. If the Senators pick Rick Scott, a man who I know is nothing if not loyal, then we may really be on the verge of a new golden era. If not, then I fear that the swamp will fight Trump every inch of the way.
Andrew Pollack is the author of Why Meadow Died: The People and Policies That Created The Parkland Shooter and Endanger America’s Students.
