Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, a self-styled firebrand and close adviser to and surrogate for President Trump, on Monday joined the GOP chorus calling for quick approval of the Supreme Court nominee to be put up by the White House and urged voters to punish Republican senators who block action.
Turning his fire on two moderate GOP senators who’ve indicated they’d like to wait on voting until after the November election, Gaetz suggested voters withhold voting for them in the fall.
“If Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski are going to withhold their vote for the president’s nominee, then Republicans in those states should withhold their votes from them. What good are Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski if we can’t count on them to fulfill their obligation to advise and consent during the term in which they’ve been elected,” said the lawmaker.
Gaetz, who is starting to promote his new book due out tomorrow, Firebrand, Dispatches from the Front Lines of the MAGA Revolution, also took aim at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has pushed through a record number of federal court nominees for Trump.
“The court is his legacy. So if the court is McConnell’s legacy, he sure as hell better deliver on the president’s nominee,” said Gaetz, who expressed frustration with the senator’s leadership style.
For example, he told Secrets that the GOP Senate should have voted on former President Barack Obama’s pick of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court instead of waiting until the outcome of the 2016 election. That has led Democrats to call for a delay in replacing the late Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
“Republicans should have held that vote. And if they didn’t want to vote for him, they shouldn’t have voted for him. And I think there were plenty of reasons to vote against Merrick Garland. But that was a mistake then, and it puts us in a worse position now, and frank, as we engage in the type of revolution that I think we need in our politics to achieve the full value of the Trump presidency, we need to see a Senate that takes more tough votes on more things going forward,” he said.
While only a two-term lawmaker, Gaetz has become one of the core members of the Trump insiders group in Congress, often talking to the president and helping on White House issues.
In his new autobiographical book, published by Bombardier, he rips lawmakers he sees as weak, the “swamp,” and the media for holding Trump back. He also cheers the president’s actions.
“This is not a book for those who want to grin and bear it. This book is about winning, winning so much you get sick of it. After all, isn’t that what you were promised?” he wrote.
He also said that a new model for lawmakers on both sides of the aisle is emerging, one less reliant on big donors, political parties, and PAC donations, and built more on forceful positions and personalities.
“In many ways, the revolution is a revolution against the establishment of both parties. Because it’s not going to be (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) that blocks us from reshaping the Supreme Court for a generation, it’s going to be Republicans who don’t have the gumption,” he said.
“There is a new model now that is not reliant on whoring out for special interests or sucking up to leadership. There is a direct line for many of us to the White House and to the president,” he said, adding new Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, a former House rabble-rouser, is the “masthead for that revolution.”
He pointed to unopposed Republican Georgia House candidate Marjorie Taylor Green as an example of how the model is working to promote conservative candidates.
“The thing about Marjorie is that she actually front-loads the America First elements of her policy views,” said Gaetz.
Noting that one of his chapters in his book addresses “endless wars” and the need to avoid them, Gaetz said, “Marjorie Green, in a little old district in Georgia, is making a major case about American pragmatic foreign policy, and that is, I think, very motivating to those of us in the movement who want to see a shift away from the neocon worldview.”
