Rick Scott and Josh Hawley blast fellow Republicans for supporting liberal policies and ‘globalism’

NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland — Sens. Rick Scott (R-FL) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) criticized their own party for insufficiently supporting conservative policies during a pair of speeches at the Heritage Foundation’s 50th-anniversary summit Thursday.

The two senators approached the issue from slightly different tracks, with Scott criticizing his fellow Republicans for helping Democrats pass several bills he said were harmful to the nation, while Hawley said elements of the GOP had supported the “new world order” and “globalism.”

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Scott noted that a number of Republicans have repeatedly joined with Democrats to pass legislation and called out 10 Republican senators who helped pass a debt ceiling hike last year. The current standoff over the debt ceiling, he said, could have been done in 2021 because the Democrats needed 10 Republicans to break the Senate filibuster and pass the bill.

That group of Republicans included Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who Scott challenged last year for the Senate GOP’s senior post. McConnell (R-KY) was joined by Sens. John Thune (R-SD), John Barrasso (R-WY), Roger Wicker (R-MS), Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), Susan Collins (R-ME), Thom Tillis (R-NC), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Joni Ernst (R-IA), John Cornyn (R-TX), Mitt Romney (R-UT), and then Sens. Roy Blunt (R-MO), Richard Burr (R-NC), and Rob Portman (R-OH).

Scott also criticized his colleagues for assisting in the passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, an omnibus spending bill in December 2022, and the CHIPS Act, which was billed as an anti-China bill.

“This has to change,” Scott said. “We actually have a Republican Party. We have conservatives all over the country. We just don’t have enough of them in D.C.”

Hawley, for his part, said the Republican Party is “not well prepared” to challenge a wave of liberal “globalism” that began when the fall of the Soviet Union brought about a globalized economy that he said had gutted the middle class.

The Missouri senator noted that the judges nominated by President Joe Biden believe that the criminal justice system of the United States is “corrupt to its foundations” and said the Democratic Party had been taken over by cultural Marxists. Republican policies, he said, have also contributed to the spread of cultural Marxism, which adapts the economic class warfare proposed by the philosopher Karl Marx beyond economic classes to identity classes such as race and gender.

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“I contend to you that the Republican Party of the last 30 years has been part of the problem,” Hawley said. “The Republican Party for decades now has, in its policies, helped to undermine the very people I contend to you are the most important bulwark against cultural Marxism today, and I’m talking about working Americans.”

“If we are going to be the party that saves this nation for the new Marxism, we must fight for the working class in this country,” Hawley continued. “If we lose the middle class, if that culture is destroyed finally, we will lose an American culture and American society as we know it.”