Chris Christie lambasted Marco Rubio's Senate qualifications on Monday, saying he's just a "first-term senator who's still learning where the men's room is in the Senate" and ripped the Florida Republican's role with the Senate's failed immigration reform bill.
"I agree with what Sen. Rubio said himself," the New Jersey governor told Fox News'
"America's Newsroom" host Bill Hemmer. "He said just two weeks ago, 'senators and congressmen can't solve America's problems.' I couldn't agree with him more."
Further, the two-term governor said of Rubio's experience that "the only thing he's done in the Senate so far is write the amnesty bill with Chuck Schumer, and then as soon as it got too hot, he ran away and hid. That's not leadership, and that's not what we need from a president."
Rubio, he complained is also launching negative attacks on him, Jeb Bush, John Kasich and Ted Cruz, while saying he hates negative campaigns.
"He should be focused on what I'm focused on, beating Hillary Clinton," said Christie. "If you saw her in [Saturday night's] debate she'll be a third Obama term."
Rubio aide Joe Pounder, responding to Christie's statements, commented that "Christie can certainly talk, but nothing he does can cover-up his liberal record in New Jersey of supporting Common Core, gun control, and Obama's pick of liberal Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court," reports
CNN.
"For someone who likes to tell it like it is, there's no covering up that Gov. Christie has fiercely supported a liberal agenda in New Jersey."
Rubio's camp has been hitting Christie hard on Sotomayor and Common Core, but on Monday, the New Jersey governor said that Sotomayor would not have been his appointee, but at the same time, "the president has the right to appoint his justices."
Christie also commented on the release of five American prisoners from Iran, saying that while he is "thrilled these folks are home" the release sends a message to the world that "every time an American gets taken, he's going to pay ransom."
President Barack Obama, said Christie, "thinks that is strong American diplomacy, that he pays ransom to terrorists, the same people who took our naval sailors and had them on their knees with their hands on their heads.
"The same people who burnt American flags and chant death to America. They pick this president's pocket day after day after day and they make a fool of him and a fool of our country."