Last Thursday, the New York Times reported on Florida senator Rick Scott’s continued efforts to “sunset” Social Security and Medicare — that is, subject them to congressional reapproval every five years, failing which they would cease to exist. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, outraged that Scott insists on publicly slapping a Republican sticker on an extremely unpopular policy, went so far as to suggest Scott would have trouble winning reelection in a state heavily populated with retirees. The intraparty feud is doubly awkward for Republicans given that Scott heads the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the fundraising and campaign group for Senate Republicans.

Scott appeared to relent the next day, saying he would now exclude Social Security, Medicare, and veterans’ benefits from the proposed “sunset” requirements. But then on Tuesday, he once again asserted the need to “fix” Social Security and Medicare, without specifying how. With this shift, Scott merely got in line with the more traditional Republican rhetoric about supposedly “fixing” or “strengthening” Social Security by privatizing it.

In the same Fox Business segment in which he finally got on-message about “fixing” Social Security and Medicare, Scott spoke with ghoulish glee about budget cutting, claiming that when he was governor of Florida he personally went through the state’s entire budget to find more programs to cut. “There’s four thousand lines in the budget in Florida. I went line by line and said, we are not going to fund this if it doesn’t meet its purpose,” Scott said.