Time to give up on Marco Rubio, who will never do the right thing if there’s any risk
Editorial that appeared in the Orlando Sentinel on May 27.
So Marco Rubio declared on Twitter he’s a no vote on creating a commission to get to the bottom of the Jan. 6 insurrection.
That’s the least surprising news since Rubio voted against convicting Donald Trump after the former president encouraged the insurrection, the clearest case for impeachment and removal of a president in U.S. history.
We always hold out hope Rubio will do the right thing and he almost always disappoints. Well, he did join 92 other U.S. senators in voting not to throw out the votes of nearly 7 million Pennsylvanians in the 2020 presidential election, which is more than Rick Scott can say.
That’s where we are today: A U.S. senator from Florida gets credit for not tossing out an entire state’s vote for president because Trump and the pillow guy didn’t like the outcome and promoted insane election conspiracy theories.
Earlier this week, the Miami Herald’s editorial board gamely encouraged Rubio to change his mind and support the bipartisan proposal to create a bipartisan panel to dig into the most serious domestic threat to the republic since the Civil War.
Why do we need a commission? Consider these words:
“We need to learn as much as we can: A, because it was a shameful day — something that should never happen again — and B, because I think our enemies of this country, terrorists and others, will look to learn from that day, potentially, one day take lessons learned from it to attack us here.” That’s not from the Herald’s editorial. That’s what Rubio himself said less than two weeks ago.
Sorry to say it, but Marco Rubio is beyond hope.
Before the insurrection, we, too, took a few stabs at encouraging Rubio to do the right thing.
After Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death just weeks before last year’s election, we asked Rubio to stand by the Merrick Garland doctrine he and the GOP embraced in 2016 — that replacing a Supreme Court justice in a presidential election year should be left to the election’s winner.
We asked him to go ahead and support Trump’s policies if he must but to take a stand in opposition to Trump’s worst, most grotesque impulses.
What’s the point of appealing to someone who swore off another Senate run when he ran for president in 2016, then turned around and ran for the Senate? Someone who negotiated a bipartisan immigration reform bill and then campaigned against it?
We’ve been waiting a decade for Rubio to do the right thing. But the senator is Lucy with the football, and every Floridian who trusts him is Charlie Brown.
Rubio had us halfway believing he wouldn’t yank the ball away again when he offered the justification we quoted earlier, telling The Dispatch, a conservative online magazine, that he was open to a special, 9/11-style commission to investigate the insurrection.
“My general feeling is that if we can have a serious examination of the events leading up to, occurring, and in the aftermath of that day, we should do it,” Rubio said. He went on to say the commission didn’t need to delve into last summer’s racial unrest, as other Republicans had suggested.
That was May 18. On May 19 the House voted in favor of the commission, with 35 Republicans (two from Florida) joining the Democrats.
Just two days later, Rubio tweeted out a video deriding the bipartisan proposal as “a partisan joke.”
His primary objection centered on the proposed commission’s ability to subpoena testimony under oath. Even though subpoenas would require approval from both Republicans and Democrats on the proposed commission, Rubio is convinced that commission Dems will attempt to use the subpoena power just to embarrass the GOP. And if Republicans vetoed a subpoena, according to Rubio’s reasoning, the media would embarrass the Republicans by reporting that news.
Rubio is satisfied that we’ll learn everything we need to learn through congressional hearings and Department of Justice prosecutions.
Except, we all know it’ll be easier to dismiss congressional findings as partisan witch hunts, and that individual DOJ prosecutions are unlikely to paint a bigger picture about what went wrong and why.
In the history of this nation we’ve never seen the likes of what happened on Jan. 6. And yet, somehow, that doesn’t merit an extraordinary inquiry into why and how it happened so that, as Rubio recently put it, such a thing would “never happen again.”
Rubio’s stated reasons are phony. He’s afraid an honest inquiry would make his party look worse than it already does ahead of the midterm elections.
Even more terrifying to him is the prospect of getting primaried if he stands up to the party. Just look at all the Trump family members flocking to Florida. Any one of them could step right in and probably squash Rubio like a bug if he gets out of line.
It’s time to surrender any hope that Rubio will ever do the right thing if there’s any risk involved.
