Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is in the habit of pushing past questions to get to a position from which he can rail against “woke ideology.” It’s effective politics, DeSantis has calculated, and it has worked for him so far in Florida, where he won his reelection bid by a large margin.
But as DeSantis goes national in his bid to oust former President Donald Trump from the top slot for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, he is being asked about more than his war against Disney and DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) policies.
His answers to these national questions often open him to criticism like that from California Congressman Ted Lieu, who said after a recent DeSantis interview, citing DeSantis’s proposed elimination of the IRS, that DeSantis is simply “not a serious candidate.”
The below person is not a serious candidate. https://t.co/cX1vjrWTnR
— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) June 28, 2023
In a segment with Martha MacCallum on Fox, DeSantis is asked if he would consider eliminating any government agencies as President.
DeSantis immediately names four departments he’d scuttle. “We would do Education. We would do Commerce. We’d do Energy. And we would do IRS.”
MacCallum, seeming astonished, tries to ask DeSantis about that — “Eliminate the IRS?” she says.
DeSantis doesn’t immediately acknowledge the question and moves on to say “if Congress won’t work with me, I’m going to use those agencies to push back against the woke ideology and leftism that we see creeping into all institutions of American life.”
NOTE: A small group of Republicans in Congress has introduced a plan — with the appealing name FairTax — to abolish the IRS and replace the nation’s revenue base with a national sales tax, which would start by adding a 23% tax on all items. DeSantis’s support of the FairTax measure has brought rebuke from Trump.
