Some on the right lately have denounced Sen. Marco Rubio, R – Fla., as the Republican establishment’s plan B, now that Jeb Bush has fizzled.
One Miami-based conservative activist dismisses Rubio as “white Republican Obama.”
How absurd. Rubio is not Bob Dole with palm trees. And if Rubio is a “moderate,” as Sen. Ted Cruz, R – Texas, claims, then John McCain is Ho Chi Minh.
How soon we forget: Marco Rubio was a 2010 tea party pinup. He was endorsed by the devoutly anti-establishment Club for Growth.
Rather than grow a RINO horn, Rubio reliably votes right.
The American Conservative Union gave Rubio a 96 rating (out of 100) for 2014 and 98 across his Senate career. Heritage Action handed Rubio a 94 last year and 91 lifetime. The equivalent Club for Growth numbers are 92 and 93.
These sparkling right-wing credentials notwithstanding, Rubio works and plays well enough with others to enact conservative legislation — sometimes with Democratic support.
- Rubio and Senator Jeanne Shaheen, D–N.H., co-sponsored the Hezbollah International Financing Prevention Act. This brand-new law limits the Iranian-backed terrorist group’s access to global financial markets and punishes banks that serve this band of anti-American, anti-Israeli killers. Hezbollah itself denounced Rubio’s law as “a new crime by American institutions against our people and nation.”
- Rubio torpedoed Obama’s planned bailout of his health-insurance cronies who lose money due to Obamacare. So far, Rubio has saved taxpayers some $2.5 billion and prevented insurers from socializing their Obamacare losses. Mega-insurers UnitedHealthCare and Cigna have fallen out of love with Obamacare and may flee Obama’s exchanges in 2017. Rubio’s low-key amendment to the 2014 omnibus spending bill looks like the thumbtack that slowly will give Obamacare a flat tire.
Cruz “forced a shutdown over it,” the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin recalled. “Every GOP presidential candidate vows to repeal it. But only [Rubio] can claim to have done something tangible to hobble, maybe permanently, Obamacare.”
- In light of the Department of Veteran Affairs’ appalling and deadly neglect of America’s vets, Rubio sponsored legislation to make it easier for the VA secretary to fire incompetent and corrupt bureaucrats whose sloth actually has killed sick veterans as they awaited medical care.
- Before Rubio’s measure was signed into law, he had to overcome Senator Bernie Sanders’s objections. The Vermont socialist tried in vain to sink Rubio’s proposal and, thus, protect the job security of VA workers.
- Rubio and Democrats Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Bill Nelson of Florida were original sponsors of a December 2014 law that condemns and tightens sanctions on Venezuela’s Castroite tyranny.
Ted Cruz is also a tea party/Club for Growth–approved hero with sky-high conservative scores. Alas, Cruz’s go-it-alone style has limited his effectiveness as a lawmaker who can pass legislation.
Cruz’s Senate website cites just one piece of legislation that he has guided into law: a 2014 statute bars entry visas to U.N. ambassadors who have committed espionage or terrorism against America or threaten U.S. national security.
Also telling: Among those who work closely with both of these men, three Republican senators have endorsed Rubio — Montana’s Steve Daines, Colorado’s Cory Gardner, and Idaho’s James Risch.
In contrast, none of Cruz’s Senate colleagues recommends him for president. Rubio has raised suspicions for initially co-sponsoring comprehensive immigration reform, nicknamed “amnesty.”
However, Rubio abandoned the bill once it metastasized into a 1,198-page monstrosity. “We must begin by acknowledging that, considering our recent experience with massive pieces of legislation, achieving comprehensive reform of anything in a single bill is simply not realistic,” Rubio wrote in his book American Dreams.
Instead, Rubio now calls for a “sequential and piecemeal” approach “with a series of bills that build upon one another until ultimately we have put in place the kind of immigration system our nation needs.”
The affable Marco Rubio votes with conservatives more than 90 percent of the time and even gets Democrats to back his right-wing reforms.
What a moderate.
Deroy Murdock is a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University. Read more reports from Deroy Murdock — Click Here Now.