As American families confront higher prices for everyday needs, Republicans celebrate their economic calamity and root for more to come.

With eyes aglow, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, Senate Republicans’ campaign chief, allowed himself to imagine just how bad things could get for the American public.  

“You can see what’s going to happen next. We’re going to continue to have inflation, and then interest rates will go up,” Scott told the Wall Street Journal, clamoring for the Federal Reserve to raise rates, thereby making borrowing more expensive for consumers and slowing economic growth, among other things.

“This is a gold mine for us,” Scott added, clearly unable to contain his glee.

Republicans have been pounding home inflationary concerns for months in hopes that they will spiral out of control and backfire on Democrats in the midterms next year. But Republicans aren’t just cheerleading for economic calamity; they are doing their level best to make it a reality.

Much of today’s inflation, which is a global problem at the moment, is being propelled by supply chain issues due to the pandemic.  

Among the best ways to ease inflation is to further contain the pandemic, which would lessen inflationary pressure in multiple ways, including the fact that U.S. consumers would start putting more money into the service economy again (eating out, taking trips, etc.) rather than primarily focusing their buying power on goods.

That’s precisely why the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a longtime GOP booster, is now urging businesses with 100-plus employees across the country to follow President Joe Biden’s mandate on either vaccinating their workforce or implementing weekly coronavirus testing—because containing the pandemic is good economic policy.

The vaccination/testing mandate from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has been indefinitely put on hold by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals due to a GOP-driven court challenge. The emergency standard would cover some 84 million employees, about two-thirds of the private-sector workforce.

But Chamber vice president Marc Freedman recommended that employers implement the Biden mandate anyway in a statement to CNBC.

“Ultimately, the courts are going to decide, but employers still need to take this as a live ETS until it is definitively shut down,” Marc Freedman said of the temporary emergency standard. “They should not bank on the preliminary actions of the 5th Circuit.”

In the meantime, Republican politicians are doing everything in their power both legally and politically to jettison Biden’s mitigation efforts despite what is being counseled by a dependable GOP ally and one of the top business lobbies in the country.

Along with multiple GOP governors banning local officials and school districts from requiring vaccinations or masking, Republican officials at the state level have joined forces to mount a legal challenge to the OSHA order. That legal push follows on another GOP-led effort to turn back Biden’s vaccine mandate for federal contractors.

So Republicans are doing more than just rooting for the U.S. economy to tank, taking American families’ finances and economic security with it. They are also actively combatting the Biden administration’s efforts to save lives and get the economy up and running again at full force.

Some might call that supremely unpatriotic, but at the very least it is a huge f-you to everyday Americans trying to make ends meet.