During the Friday conference call, Frankel told reporters that Rubio’s “barely showing up” for his Senate job. When he cast a Senate vote last week, it was his first in 26 days. “That’s why I’m missing votes”.
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“No, his rhetoric is a little louder, but if you think about where he was six months ago, his position on immigration six months ago was nothing like what he’s saying now, and even what he’s saying now borders on the absurd”, Rubio said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.
Marco Rubio defended his heavily criticized absences from almost one third of Senate votes this year, saying his presidential campaign requires him to be out on the trail, and dismissed suggestions that his call for delinquent federal workers to be fired was hypocritical.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), defending himself against criticism that he’s missed more votes this year than any other senator, blamed both his campaign schedule and the futility of voting on bills that are never going to pass. “A lot of these votes won’t mean anything. They’re not going to pass and, even if they did, the President would veto it”.
Those missed votes include one earlier this month on the National Defense Authorization Act.
GANGEL: The other day, though, you got up on the Senate floor and you said federal workers who don’t show up should be fired.
But for a mainstream audience, the fact that Rubio effectively wasted his Capitol Hill career, achieving practically nothing despite all the promise and hype, isn’t much of a selling point.
“He wouldn’t be doing what he’s doing now if he were a quitter”, said Norman Braman, a Florida auto dealer and one of Rubio’s longtime donors: Washington Post.
GANGEL: What did you say?
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Part of this, of course, is the result of his campaign schedule, but part of it also relates to the fact that Rubio appears to dislike his job quite a bit. “We are still involved in looking out for Florida’s issues”. However, he’s still facing a few serious hurdles: he’s well behind Donald Trump and Ben Carson in the polls, as a first-term senator running for president he’s often accused of lacking experience (the Barack Obama comparisons only make things worse), and he’s being attacked for having the worst attendance record of any senator in the current Congress. American Bridge 21st Century, a Democratic-leaning political action committee, recently released a “missing” poster featuring his face. Caught in his hypocrisy, Rubio tried to dig his means out, “Not true”. I’m fully aware. We have a staffer that’s assigned to intelligence, we get constant briefings.
