Team Rubio’s flailing efforts to come up with any successes Marco Rubio has had in the Senate have been on center stage this week after his new-found surrogate Rick Santorum failed — multiple times — to name a single accomplishment that Rubio’s had on the job.
From Morning Joe:
SCARBOROUGH: Can you name his top accomplishment in the Senate? Actually working in the Senate, doing something that tilted your decision to Marco Rubio?SANTORUM: You know, here’s what I would say about that. My feeling on Marco is someone that has tremendous potential, tremendous gifts. If you look at being a minority in the United States Senate, in four years where nothing got done I guess it’s hard to say there are accomplishments. You tell me, what happened in those four years that were an accomplishments for anybody? It was complete gridlock.…SCARBOROUGH: I could list some things that got happened but I’m not defending the Congress. I’m not being difficult here, I’m just asking you to list one accomplishment that Marco Rubio — list accomplishment — just one — that Marco achieved, maybe a bill that he wrote? Maybe a moment in a committee?…SANTORUM: I know he included something that went after the insurance companies in the most recent omnibus. I know that he fought for that to stop bailing out insurance companies. That’s one thing that I’m familiar with that I just saw recently. And again, he was on the campaign trail and accomplished that. The bottom line is, there isn’t a whole lot of accomplishments, Joe and I just don’t think it’s a fair question.
Rubio’s GOP opponents have zeroed in on his underwhelming Senate record. And over a day after Santorum’s accidental truth-telling, reporters are still struggling to come up with anything meaningful Rubio’s actually done — all the Rubio campaign has had to offer is “thin gruel.”
Unfortunately for Marco Rubio, his lack of accomplishment points to the Florida Senator’s larger problem of absenteeism and habit of always looking for a new way to climb the political ladder instead of doing his job. It’s almost as though he loves the job titles but hates working for them:
- Rubio missed 35% of Senate votes last year, and has an abysmal career voting record. Rubio has missed an egregious 88% of votes to-date in 2016.
- In the last several months alone, Rubio’s skipped important Foreign Relations Committee hearings to attend fundraisers, missing classified committee meetings on topics such as Paris attacks and North Korea — he postponed a fundraiser to scramble back to DC for the latter briefing, but only managed to catch the last 20 minutes.
- NBC reported this week that Rubio missed 30% of the classes he was required to teach as a part-time professor at Florida International University. Not only was his billionaire benefactor, Norman Braman, personally funding the semi-show FIU position, Rubio was also paid tens of thousands more than other part-time professors and at a comparable rate to his full-time co-teacher.
Published: Feb 6, 2016