'Terrible political fall': Scarborough rips GOP for pushing US off a 'fiscal cliff'

When former Rep. Joe Scarborough (R-Florida) was serving in Congress during the 1990s, he had a give-and-take relationship with the Clinton Administration.

Scarborough criticized then-President Bill Clinton at times but also supported him at times, and he worked on bipartisan legislation. Being conservative, Scarborough argued, didn't have to mean being adversarial to Democrat-created programs like Social Security and Medicaid.

During a Friday morning, April 11 broadcast of "Morning Joe," the ex-congressman turned MSNBC today slammed President Donald Trump and his allies' economic policies as the worst of both worlds. Trump and other MAGA Republicans, Scarborough warned, are harming Medicaid while doing nothing to lower the United States' federal deficit.

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Scarborough, attacking a GOP budget resolution, told MSNBC financial analyst Steve Rattner, "You and I have been talking about this now for well over a decade. We're at $36 trillion right now. We're already in a fiscal crisis. We can't add another 5 trillion to the debt. I just do sit here and just wonder how any conservative…. how any economic conservative, could have voted for this resolution, knowing they're going to add $5 trillion more to a $36 trillion debt that, again, is actually pushing us toward a fiscal cliff."

The Never Trump conservative emphasized, however, efforts to balance the federal budget shouldn't come at the expense of Medicare or Medicaid.

"Republicans are setting themselves up for a terrible political fall when they're pushing tax cuts, a continuation of tax cuts, for the richest billionaires, for millionaires, for multinational corporations, you name it," Scarborough warned. "And what is their answer to that? Cutting Medicaid. With absolutely, I guess, no idea that that's going to impact disproportionately voters in their own states. Voters in Red State America, rural voters."

Scarborough continued, "You know, it kind of reminds me of FDR and the New Deal. My mom and her family were raised in Dalton, Georgia and Rome, Georgia, in the depths of the Great Depression. FDR was responsible for them getting through the worst of the Depression. And now, you have Rural America suffering again. Rural hospitals under attack, closing down over the past ten years. Up to 50 percent of children get their primary health care from Medicaid. So many parents and grandparents go into nursing homes that are funded by Medicaid. Hospitals are going to be shutting down; that will require people to take an ambulance like 40, 50 miles."

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