ThinkProgress Logo

Stories tagged with “Marco Rubio”

Politics

As Obama Calls On Nation To Remember Newtown, Rubio Pledges To Block Gun Reform

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Mar 28, 2013 at 1:48 pm

Minutes before President Obama delivered an emotional speech asking lawmakers to pass sensible gun safety measures in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, word came from Capitol Hill that Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) had signed onto a letter pledging to block votes on any of Obama’s proposals for gun legislation.

Obama delivered his speech surrounded by a group of victims of gun violence, including three parents of Newtown victims. All had come to Washington to demand that Congress take action to stop gun violence. Obama’s speech called on average citizens to ask for the same:

The notion that two months or three months after something as horrific as what happened in Newtown happens and we’ve moved on to other things, that’s not who we are. That’s not who we are.

And I want to make sure every American is listening today. Less than 100 days ago that happened, and the entire country was shocked. And the entire country pledged we would do something about it and that this time would be different. Shame on us if we’ve forgotten. I haven’t forgotten those kids. Shame on us if we’ve forgotten.

If there’s one thing I’ve said consistently since I first ran for this office: Nothing is more powerful than millions of voices calling for change. And that’s why it’s so important that all these moms and dads are here today. But that’s also why it’s important that we’ve got grassroots groups out there that got started and are out there mobilizing and organizing and keeping up the fight.

Sen. Mike Lee’s (R-UT) office was the first to announce that Rubio had signed onto the filibuster pledge, a joint effort by the offices of Lee and Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Ted Cruz (R-TX). In an earlier statement, Lee claimed that Obama was using “the tragedy at Newtown as a backdrop for pushing legislation that would have done nothing to prevent that horrible crime.”

There’s no question that some parts of Obama’s gun violence prevention proposals would elicit strong opinions in the Senate, but by promising to filibuster them, Rubio, Lee, Cruz, and Paul are actually blocking the “robust and open debate” that they claim to be seeking. A majority of Americans support background checks and bans on high capacity ammunition, two of the proposals in Obama’s package, but thanks to the filibuster they might never see a debate on the floor.

In his speech on Thursday, Obama pushed for proposals including universal background checks, stricter penalties for people who buy guns with the intention of selling them to criminals (straw purchasers), an assault weapons ban, and a limit on high-capacity magazine clips.

LGBT

Rubio: Denying Marriage To Gays ‘Does Not Make Me A Bigot’

By Igor Volsky on Mar 14, 2013 at 2:13 pm

Marco Rubio complained about his critics during a speech before the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) on Thursday afternoon, saying that Democrats didn’t “respect” him or his policy positions.

Rubio joked about his much-publicized sip of water during the GOP response to President Obama’s State of the Union address and appeared on stage with a tray of water glasses, before complaining about feeling judged for opposing marriage equality, access to reproductive health care services, and the science behind climate change — suggesting that his positions should be respected no matter how out of step they are with mainstream consensus:

RUBIO: I respect people who disagree with me on certain things, but that means they have to respect me too. Just because I believe states should have the right to define marriage in a traditional way does not make me a bigot. Just because we believe that life, all human life, all life, all human life is worthy of protection in every stage of its development doesn’t make you a chauvinist. In fact, the people who are actually close minded in American politics are people who love to preach about the certainty of science in regard to our climate, but ignore the absolute fact that life begins at conception.

Watch it:

Rubio is in fact behind the curve on LGBT rights, women’s health, and climate change. As a growing number of Americans are growing more tolerant and accepting of same-sex unions, believe that women should be able to afford contraception, and see climate change as a real threat to the planet, Rubio seems stuck in the past.

He wouldn’t take a position on legislation that would prohibit employers from firing employees on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identify and wouldn’t say “whether same-sex couples should receive protections under immigration law.” Rubio has introduced legislation that would allow employers to deny women access to birth control, voted against the motion to proceed to debate the Violence Against Women Act, and still thinks that the existence of global warming is up for scientific debate.

Rather than wonder why his critics disagree with him, Rubio should be willing to deal with the consequences of the policies he espouses and how some perceive and interpret them.

Health

Marco Rubio: I’ll Vote To Shut Down The Government Unless Obamacare Is Completely Defunded

By Sy Mukherjee on Mar 8, 2013 at 12:50 pm

During an interview on conservative host Hugh Hewitt’s talk radio program Thursday night, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined fellow Tea Party favorites Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mike Lee (R-UT) in demanding that a continuing resolution to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year include provisions to defund Obamacare in its entirety.

Over the course of the program, Rubio parroted the usual litany of wild — and widely debunked — conservative hysteria about the dire consequences that Obamcare will have on American businesses and the U.S. health care industry, asserting that he would only vote to avert a government shutdown if Obamcare implementation is halted completely:

HEWITT: Senator Rubio, the continuing resolution is headed your way. How is this stacking up as Act III of the spending drama?

RUBIO: Well first of all, I don’t think anyone is in favor of shutting down the government, but I think that’s where we’re headed ultimately here, unfortunately, if we don’t fix our debt problem… But here’s what I’ve said about this continuing resolution. Senator Cruz from Texas is offering this amendment to defund Obamacare. If that gets onto the bill, in essence, if they get a continuing resolution and we can get a vote on that and pass that onto the bill, I’ll vote for a continuing resolution, even if it’s temporary, because it does something permanent, and that’s defund this health care bill, this Obamacare bill, that is going to be an absolute disaster for the American economy. You’re already starting to feel the outer edges of that… I already am running into businesses that are planning next year on not hiring people or laying some people off so they don’t have to meet these mandates. Others are going to push their employees off of their private plans that they offer and onto these exchanges, driving up the cost for the public. So this is going to be an implementation disaster. It’s going to hurt our economy severely. And we’re not spending enough time talking about that.

Later on, Hewitt asked if Rubio would settle for partially defunding Obamacare — specifically, by repealing a provision levying a 2.3 percent tax on medical devices — in exchange for funding the government. Rubio replied, “I don’t know if that alone would be enough” to secure his vote for the continuing resolution, but that he “certainly would support that amendment.”

Defunding the health reform law would devastate tens of millions of Americans who would no longer receive federal subsidies for purchasing health insurance or have expanded access to public insurance programs such as Medicaid. It would also fly in the face of public opinion, since the majority of Americans believe that implementing Obamacare should be a “top priority” in their state. And contrary to some Republicans’ claims, a government shutdown would be a decidedly bad development for essential government services and the American economy at large.

Alyssa

From GQ To Drones, How Hip-Hop Ate Marco Rubio’s Brand

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Mar 8, 2013 at 9:19 am

My friend Alan Pyke eviscerated Sen. Marco Rubio’s understanding of the issues that animate hip-hop, a genre he repeatedly claims to love, and that’s become the basis of his claim to be youthful and relatable, in a post here a month ago. In the time since, it’s been amusing to watch Rubio embrace this part of his cultural tastes that the mainstream media seems to find amusing, even to the point of absurdity, as happened when he joined Sen. Rand Paul’s filibuster of John Brennan, President Obama’s nominee to run the Central Intelligence Agency, earlier this week.

Now, filibusters often have a reputation for silliness, whether it’s Senators reading from phone books, the question of how someone can go that long without relieving him or herself, or merely because of the futility of the event. But Paul’s filibuster, for all that I disagree with him on nearly every issue, and for all that I wish his concerns about the use of drones wasn’t limited to the use of them against United States citizens on U.S. soil, was a substantive, serious affair for the most part. So it was entertaining, and maybe a little jarring, to watch Rubio use the event not just as a way to poke the administration with a sharp stick, but to reinforce his credentials as a hip-hop head.

And make no mistake, he was diving for opportunities to mention rappers like a Hail Mary pass was on its way to his fingertips. When Rubio took the floor, he started out by telling his colleagues that: “In that question, he used Shakespeare references, he used a reference to the movie Patton, which is one of the great movies. I didn’t bring my Shakespeare book, so let me just begin by quoting a modern-day poet. His name is Whiz Khalifa. He has a song called ‘Work Hard, Play Hard.’ If you look at the time, it’s a time when many of our colleagues expected to be in the home state playing hard, but I’m happy that we’re here still working hard on this issue.” Later, discussion how former President George W. Bush’s use of drones would have been received by the Senate, Rubio mused: “That takes me back to another modern-day poet by the name of Jay-Z. In one of his songs, he wrote ‘It’s funny what seven days can change. It was all good a week ago.’ I don’t know if it was all good a week ago, but I can tell you that things have really changed. Because if the question was George W. Bush and this was a question being asked of him, and his response was the silence that we’ve gotten, we’d have a very different scenario here tonight.” Rubio even pulls hip-hop’s own cultural obsessions into the mix, saying he’ll “Go to a movie, one of the great American movies, The Godfather. There’s a quote in this movie—I don’t have the Patton quotes, but I have The Godfather quotes. This is one of the best-known ones. It says, ‘I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse.’ To me, these are offers you can’t refuse.”

There’s something terribly middle-brow about Rubio’s attempts to demonstrate his cred, the equivalent of a college freshman proffering up Atlas Shrugged quotes as proof of erudition and a sophisticated worldview. It’s even tackier to watch him scramble, Patton quotations aside, given the general seriousness of Paul’s filibuster. And it raises the question of what Rubio expects to get out of the fact that liking hip-hop has become a critical part of his brand.

Is it supposed to signal that he’s young? President Obama is ten years Rubio’s senior and has had plenty of opportunities to demonstrate that he hasn’t just surfed Rap Genius, he’ conversant with ongoing issues like the genre’s gender politics and has beefed with Kanye West from the White House podium. Is it meant to reel in rappers as endorsers when 2016 rolls around? Somehow I doubt that Jay-Z will be so flattered that Rubio knows the lyrics to “A Week Ago,” even if he’s reversing their order—interestingly enough for a song about drone strikes, the track is about snitching—that he and Beyonce will suddenly switch parties. It’s not bad campaign strategy that Rubio knows how to surf a meme, as he did when a sale of water bottles raised $125,000 for his political action committee after he got gif.-ed reaching for a drink during his State of the Union rebuttal. But cleverness and snappiness aren’t the same things as wisdom. And if I were Rubio’s advisors, I’d be concerned that the candidate’s fondness for hip-hop and ability to roll with a joke were becoming the core of his brand. Those are better credentials to be someone’s frat brother than to be president.

Immigration

Marco Rubio Is Trying To Have It Both Ways On Immigration Reform

By Igor Volsky on Feb 19, 2013 at 1:24 pm

In January, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined a group of eight senators working to pass comprehensive immigration reform with a path to citizenship for the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants. Appearing on a series of conservative talk radio stations to promote the plan, the first-term senator characterized the effort as “the first step” in the long road toward fixing the nation’s broken immigration system and said he expected to incorporate changes from both President Obama and the American public before any bill could become law.

“All we can come up with is a starting point…there are, you know, 94 other senators who have opinions about what this law should look like and there is the American public and there is the House and the Executive Branch so obviously people are going to have some input as to what they want it to look like …this is the first step, this is the architecture,” Rubio told Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey in January.

But on Sunday, Rubio signaled that he has little actual interest in collaborating with the White House on reform. After USA Today published a leaked and incomplete draft of President Obama’s immigration reform bill — which resembles 2007′s bipartisan legislation and Rubio’s own principles — the first-term senator rushed a statement condemning the administration for contributing to the very debate he claimed would be incomplete without its input. Rather than offering a constructive critique of the leaked portions or highlighting areas of similarity, Rubio announced that Obama’s bill is “disappointing to those of us working on a serious solution” and is “dead on arrival in Congress.”

The statement, designed to convince conservatives that the immigration reform principles Rubio supports differ drastically from Obama’s, is particularly jarring in light of the senator’s past insistance that the president should lead on immigration.

Earlier this year, Rubio told the Wall Street Journal that Obama has “not done a thing” on reform and is likely using the issue to mobilize the Democratic base. During the presidential campaign, Rubio criticized Obama for failing to achieve reform in his first term. “His party controlled Congress for two years,” he told Fox News in October, “and they did absolutely nothing.”

But now that Obama is engaged with the issue, Rubio is still outraged: He’s claiming that the president is undermining the Congressional legislative process by developing an alternative plan should bipartisan talks break down while complaining that Obama isn’t involved enough in one-on-one conversations with lawmakers.

Immigration

Republicans Attack Obama For Drafting Immigration Reform Plan That Resembles Bipartisan Principles

By Nicole Flatow on Feb 17, 2013 at 1:46 pm

On Sunday, Republicans lashed out at a leaked draft of the White House’s plan to reform the immigration system.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) said any proposal from the president that lacked Republican input would be “dead on arrival” and is “hurting the effort” at reform. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) claimed that Obama was looking for a “partisan advantage” on the issue and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) announced that the draft demonstrated that “the president doesn’t want immigration reform.”

But as White House Chief of Staff Dennis McDonough made clear during appearances on several Sunday talk shows, Obama is committed to immigration reform but is developing a back-up plan, to be used only in the event that talks “break down.” Short of negotiation failure, the White House stands firmly behind bipartisan congressional negotiations:

BOB SCHIEFFER: So is this a new plan the president is circulating?

MCDONOUGH: I think the report said … it has been circulating inside the administration. And I think the president laid out in Las Vegas last week we will be prepared with our own plans if the talks between Republicans and Democrats on the Hill break down. There is no evidence they have broken down. We continue to support that. We are involved in those efforts by providing technical assistance and providing them ideas and i hope Republicans and Democrats up there don’t get involved in a kind of typical Washington back-and-forth sideshow here and rather roll up their sleeves and get to work on writing a comprehensive immigration bill.

McDonough added on Meet the Press that the White House is doing what it always said it would do in “aggressively supporting” Hill negotiations, while developing its own back-up proposal that includes the core elements of comprehensive immigration reform: continued strengthening of the borders, crackdowns on businesses that game the system, a path to citizenship, and reasonable opportunities for legal immigration.

USA Today reports that Obama’s draft mirrors the 2007 bipartisan immigration proposal backed by President George W. Bush and Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC). But as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) admitted during an appearance on ABC’s This Week, Republicans are unlikely to support any plan with Obama’s name on it — even if it incorporates many of their own proposals.

Health

GOP ‘Savior’ Marco Rubio Falls Back On The Same Old Anti-Woman Policies

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Feb 15, 2013 at 5:15 pm

In an interview on Thursday with conservative magazine Newsmax, Tea Party standard-bearer and so-called ‘savior’ of the Republican party Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) revealed that he will become a cosponsor of the “Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act.” The bill is a concerted effort to prevent girls in dangerous family situations from going across state lines to receive abortions.

Familiarly known as “the Grandmother Incarceration Act,” CIANA bills have come up in Congress several times in recent years. Nearly every iteration of the legislation would prevent even a victim of rape or incest from getting a ride to an abortion clinic beyond state lines from her grandmother or older sibling, if she is under the age of 18. Instead, the girl would be forced to inform her parents or legal guardian, and be required to have them present.

While the bill has not yet been introduced, previous versions of the text would even apply the requirements to girls who require a medically necessary, potentially lifesaving abortion.

The fact that Rubio will serve as a co-sponsor on the legislation reveals a lot about the supposed new face of the Republican party. The policy, like many of Rubio’s policy choices, is actually an old trick from the Grand Old Party, not some new approach to Republican ideals. And it falls in line with Rubio’s party’s, and the Senator’s own, recent anti-woman efforts:

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE: Rubio voted against the Violence Against Women Act because it allocated money to rape victims.

MINIMUM WAGE: He won’t support a minimum wage, despite its huge benefits for women.

BIRTH CONTROL: The senator introduced a bill that would have prevented millions of women from accessing birth control.

PAY EQUITY: He called a bill to promote pay equity between men and women “nothing but an effort to help trial lawyers.”

With his post-State of the Union rebuttal, Rubio signed up to be the face of a Republican party that is working hard to win over women and people of color, the groups that cost Republicans the election last time around. But with Rubio’s history of anti-woman policies, and now his renewed commitment to co-sponsor more of the same, he may just on the vanguard of a new Republican path back to the same Republican problems.

Climate Progress

GOP ‘Savior’ Marco Rubio Mocks Climate Change

By Adam Peck on Feb 13, 2013 at 12:37 pm

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) made an appearance on Fox and Friends Wednesday morning less than 12 hours after delivering the GOP rebuttal to President Obama’s State of the Union address. The Republican Party’s newest champion took the time to shoot down the realities of climate change and the kinds of regulations that he himself once supported as the speaker of the house in Florida.

During his speech on Tuesday, President Obama called for a market-based approach towards solving the climate crisis, stressing the economic as well as environmental benefits that derive from investments in clean energy. In response, Rubio attacked cap and trade legislation as an economic menace that would cripple the recovery, and he repeated the claim again this morning:

RUBIO: The government can’t change the weather. I said that in the speech. We can pass a bunch of laws that will destroy our economy, but it isn’t going to change the weather. Because, for example, there are other countries that are polluting in the atmosphere much greater than we are at this point, China, India, all these countries that are still growing. They’re not going to stop doing what they’re doing. America is a country, it’s not a planet. So we can pass a bunch of laws or executive orders that will do nothing to change the climate or the weather but will devastate our economy.

Watch it:

In fact, Rubio is wrong that “there are other countries that are polluting in the atmosphere much greater than we are at this point.” There is only one — China — and it is still a long way away from reaching America’s level of cumulative carbon pollution, and it is the total pollution emitted to date that drives climate change. That’s why it is so important America lead the way on climate action.

Rubio’s anti-science rhetoric is no surprise since he has also expressed skepticism towards the nearly universal consensus among scientists that humans have played a detrimental role in climate change.

While Rubio is right that America is not a planet, he is wrong to suggest that cap and trade — which has in the past enjoyed bipartisan support — would hinder economic growth. In fact, just last week a consortium of 9 northeastern states and the privately owned energy companies that power them announced they would be expanding a regional cap and trade system that has been in place since 2008, citing the positive economic and environmental benefits reaped over the last five years.

Rubio himself sought to turn Florida into “the Silicon Valley” of the green energy industry, lauding the state’s push for a version of cap and trade legislation as a potential moneymaker for Floridian businesses during a 2008 floor speech. There is also ample evidence to suggest that investments in renewable energy would help create millions of jobs and quicken the economic recovery, not hamper it as Rubio claims.

As President Obama noted in his address, other countries — China included — have raced ahead of the United States in the development of clean, alternative energy. And in Europe, countries like Germany have taken far greater strides than the U.S in solar energy, producing as much as 80 times more electricity relative to energy consumption through photovoltaic panels as compared to the United States.

Economy

What Marco Rubio Doesn’t Understand About Debt And The Economy

By Travis Waldron on Feb 12, 2013 at 10:35 am

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio will deliver the official Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union address tonight. While Rubio has been pitched as the “savior” and “new face” of the GOP, a preview of his speech gives the indication that he is just as disconnected from the current economic reality as the rest of his party.

Previewing his speech for The Weekly Standard’s Stephen F. Hayes, Rubio said he would make the case that the national debt “has a direct impact on unemployment” and that it is hurting job growth:

“The debt has a direct impact on unemployment. Every dollar that is being lent to the government is a dollar that is not being invested in our economy,” he says. “The immediate danger of the debt, and the one that speaks to people in the real world, is the fact that the debt is contributing to the fact that they don’t have a good job.”

The idea that the national debt is harming economic growth is a favorite tenet of conservative orthodoxy, but there’s no evidence of that orthodoxy being correct. European politicians have spent the last four years attempting to spark economic growth through deficit and debt reduction, and the result has been total failure. Multiple rounds of spending cuts across Eurozone countries were never followed by economic growth, and now the Eurozone is back in recession, as are seven of its 17 countries, while unemployment is at record highs.

The United States bucked that trend and pursued economic stimulus, resulting in faster growth than Europe. Still, spending cuts have dampened the recovery. Government spending flatlined in recent years, and crunched state and federal budgets have led to the loss of roughly 700,000 government jobs — most of which are teachers, firefighters, police officers, and other middle-class public workers that could be contributing to economic growth if only they had a paycheck. The loss of those jobs has reduced demand and led to the loss of more jobs in the private sector.

America’s problem is that it is focused on spending cuts (which the Congressional Budget Office says will further dampen growth in 2013) and is not investing enough to offset the lack of private demand. Economists estimated that the American Jobs Act (blocked by Republicans three years ago) would have created more than a million jobs while boosting economic growth.

A rational Congress would look both to Europe and the U.S.’s own situation and realize that austerity has failed. But Rubio and Republicans remain convinced that the debt is “contributing to the fact that” Americans don’t have good jobs. To the extent that’s true, it is because politicians like Rubio are focused more on the debt than they are on policies that would actually help create the jobs Americans are looking for.

Climate Progress

State Of Denial: More Dirty Energy Policies Expected From Koch-Fueled Marco Rubio

By Rebecca Leber on Feb 12, 2013 at 10:31 am

After the State of the Union, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), will deliver the Republican response, where he will likely repackage many of the same dirty energy policies that lost spectacularly among voters in 2012.

Although Rubio was dubbed by TIME magazine a “new voice of the GOP,” the presidential hopeful sounds no different from the old party — particularly his positions on climate change and favoring Big Oil above all.

Just last week, Rubio claimed climate change is not a problem for his home state Florida, despite a devastating year of extreme weather. “I know people said there’s a significant scientific consensus on [human-caused climate change], but I’ve actually seen reasonable debate on that principle,” he said.

Not surprisingly, Rubio is a member of the Koch polluter caucus. He is one of five senators who received a perfect score from the Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity, and he received more of the petrochemical giant’s cash than any other Senate campaign in 2010, for a career total of $32,200. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Senator Rubio has received nearly $260,000 in dirty energy contributions from oil, gas, and coal, with his largest contribution coming from the Koch-linked group, Club for Growth.

But Rubio’s polluter backing comes at a cost. His record includes:

–Voting against repealing Big Oil subsidies to fund clean energy projects and reduce the deficit.

– Voting against extending tax credits for renewable energy, at the same time he maintained oil industry tax breaks

– Signing a pledge to Americans for Prosperity that promises to “oppose any legislation relating to climate change that includes a net increase in government revenue.”

– Voting against legislation aiding states harmed by the 2010 BP oil disaster. Rubio was the only senator from the Gulf Coast to do so, and one year later, he voted to expand coastal oil and gas exploration and issue faster drilling permits to oil companies.

Rubio has given no reason to expect anything less than a Big Oil agenda tonight.

Tiffany Germain, ThinkProgress War Room Senior Climate/Energy Researcher, contributed substantial research to this post.

Older

Newer

Switch to Mobile
ThinkProgress Signup Overlay Skip and Continue to ThinkProgress Skip and Continue to ThinkProgress

Sign Up