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U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined Bay News 9 to discuss bringing manufacturing to Florida, holding the Department of Justice accountable for going after political opponents, the truth behind the Inflation Reduction Act, and more. See below for highlights and watch the full interview here and here.
On the need for domestic manufacturing:
“You can’t be a great power if you’re not an industrial power. I think COVID reminded us that we always have to have the ability to make things. It’s no longer just making things for the military that we don’t want to rely on other countries for. The core essentials of things that we now need for a functioning economy and to be a world power has expanded. We have to have the ability to make these things.
“It’s also a source of really good, dignified work, which is important in order to have a strong country. Dignified work is what makes it possible for people to start families, own homes, invest in communities, and be volunteers in community groups. It’s the fiber that makes life possible and communities strong. The absence of dignified work is corrosive and destructive.
“Manufacturing is a great source of dignified work, but we don’t have enough opportunities for people to acquire the skills they need. We have a need for dignified work. We have employers that need the workers and we don’t yet have a system that’s providing those workers or those training opportunities. It’s something we’re going to continue to focus on by coming directly to Florida manufacturers and talking about how we can close that gap.”
On the FBI raid at Mar a Lago:
“Here’s what I think about it. You have the administration of a president whose FBI and Justice Department conducted a 30-agent raid of not just his previous electoral opponent, but his likely and potential future electoral opponent. The bar for doing that is incredibly high. To say that you are doing that because you are searching for documents, not because there’s somebody being held hostage in the basement of a building, not because some drug cartel is being run out of that building, but because you want documents that apparently had already been turned over—many of them had been—is outrageous.
“Let’s just assume for the sake of argument that they had a legitimate purpose behind those documents. You demand that his lawyers turn them over by 5:00 p.m. on Friday at this office. But when you conduct a high profile raid, you tip off the media. That’s going to happen because national outlets were on site before local media even was. You do it with as many agencies you can come up with. You tell his lawyers they can’t be in the room. You’re cutting locks, you’re taking safes. That’s a production. That’s done to send a message. The message is we are going to target political opponents.
“This is what you see in country after country around the world. It’s quite typical in many unfortunate countries in the Western Hemisphere for someone to take power and use it to go after and persecute their political opponents. Then when the supporters of their opponent speak out, they say: ‘These people are dangerous. We need to go after them as well.’ You criminalize opposition. I’m very concerned about what happened. It was wrong. It should not have happened and people should be held to account for it.”
On corruption and misjudgment in the Department of Justice:
“You would have assumed [there was a justifiable cause] back in 2015 and 2016 when there were FISA warrants, which is an even higher level of scrutiny, to wiretap individuals and go after individuals that we now know were fraudulent. We now know that there were things stated in those warrant applications that were not true, and the people who wrote it knew it wasn’t true. None of those agents have been held to account for lying to the court about that.
“The truth of the matter is you can find a judge to sign an order, especially if the agents—and we haven’t seen warrants they came up with—wrote up things that turned out not to be true. You can also judge-shop. You can also look and say, ‘I think this magistrate is likely to write the warrant versus that one.’ Do I disagree with a judge signing a warrant? I haven’t seen the warrant, but I can tell you that that alone should not guide us towards believing that this is not possible, because it’s happened multiple times already.”
On keeping Democrats accountable for their legal violations:
“It takes guts to do it, because you can’t do it assuming that most of the major networks in this country are going to cheer you on. If this was the reverse, if [Mar a Lago] was Hillary Clinton’s home and she’d been president, and she were being raided because the FBI under Donald Trump wanted her computer to look into her laptop, it would have blown up most of the major networks in this country. They would be talking about authoritarianism, the kinds of stuff we hear all the time from the other side of these debates. But because it’s Donald Trump, it’s fair game in their mind.
“There needs to be the guts to take on accountability. And I always tell people that, yes, Trump’s name was probably on the warrant for Mar a Lago. But the ultimate target here is not just Trump. It’s the political resistance. The message is that if we can do it to him, we can do this to anybody. Imagine what we can do to you. Yesterday, a Congressman had his phone seized while on vacation. They didn’t call his lawyer and tell him to produce the phone. We’ve had Peter Navarro, a high-profile situation where they, again, made a big spectacle out of coming after him and arresting him in a way that was humiliating and embarrassing. Meanwhile, we have white-collar criminals in this country who are told, ‘Can you turn yourself in at 9:00 a.m. tomorrow morning at the federal courthouse?’ It’s all being done to send a message.
“That’s my view. I feel very strongly about it. And the reason why I feel very strongly about it is because I think this is how you kill a republic. Honestly, what’s going to happen now is they’re not always going to be in power, and one day someone else is going to be in power and are going to feel like they now have the license to do that back to them. And now we are in this back-and-forth situation that makes us look like a third-world country. That’s not acceptable. No one should be in favor of what happened the other day. There are other ways that—if it’s even legitimate, which I question whether it was—they could have done it.”
On the future effects of the Mar a Lago raid in American politics:
“I don’t know if [the FBI raid] makes [Donald Trump] more or less likely to run. I have no clue about his timeline or what he decides to do in that regard. But I certainly think it has even people that we’ve heard in the public square that aren’t big fans of Donald Trump or maybe didn’t even vote for him rallying to his defense or at least showing concern. We saw statements yesterday from Andrew Yang, we saw statements from Cuomo of New York. You never think you’d see that.
“If you can put aside the partisanship for a moment, you realize that David Petraeus, who served this country well but broke the law, was raided. Sandy Berger, who was the national security adviser for Bill Clinton, actually stole, stuffed in his socks, classified information. He wasn’t raided. Both were charged with misdemeanors, not felonies. But somehow Donald Trump, because of some documents that, by the way, the president has the authority to declassify, gets a 30-agent raid in a high-profile way. I think people look at that and say, ‘This doesn’t look right.’ I think it certainly has strengthened him in that regard.”
On the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act:
“First of all, the gross inflation number went down eight-and-a-half percent, but you can’t look just at month-to-month. If you look at the price of food, it’s increased, I believe, by 10-and-a-half percent from a year ago. That’s the highest increase since 1979. Electricity prices, [which affect] all these electric cars people want to see, electricity prices went up 14-something percent in the last year. You have to not just look at the inflation number, which went up. It’s still at eight-and-a-half percent. That’s a pretty significant increase…. I guess the good news is it wasn’t 9.5 percent. It could have been worse. But it’s not good.
“This bill [the Inflation Reduction Act] is basically a climate bill. What it basically does is it takes $380 billion and uses it for tax credits so that affluent people can buy electric cars at some point in the next 10 years—because some of these cars are not ready to be made, we don’t have enough charging stations and solar panels. If you drive a gas-powered car, which is what most Americans are going to drive for the foreseeable future, there’s nothing in it for you except potentially higher prices. Because they’ve now put a tax on petroleum that’s imported, they’ve now put a tax on natural gas, your electricity bill can go up as well.
“The most outrageous thing of all [is they’ve hired] 87,000 IRS agents. We don’t have 87,000 billionaires. So what are 87,000 IRS agents going to do? They’re going to go after people who can’t afford lawyers and accountants to defend themselves, and they’re going to harass people, that’s what they’re going to do….The British Army has 81,000 soldiers and they’ve hired more than that, just the new agents for the IRS.”
On Senator Rubio’s vote against a proposal to cap insulin prices at $35:
“I would love to see lower drug prices. The problem is no one buys their [medicine] from a pharmaceutical company. You buy it from a retail pharmacy. Between the pharmacy and the pharmaceutical [company] are these benefit managers who go completely untouched in regards to how much they’re charging you.
“Under President Trump, there were rebates that were put in place so that when the end user went to the pharmacy or online pharmacy, if it was through the insurance company, and bought their pharmaceuticals, the rebate applied. The Biden Administration, because [they were related to] Trump, wiped out the rebates. And now this is their answer to it.
“It sounds like a great idea about negotiating. The problem is it’s not really negotiating. You’re a massive buyer. When you’re the federal government, there’s no negotiation. You’re telling them what you’re willing to pay. And what some pharmaceutical companies would do—and I’m not necessarily always a big fan of every pharmaceutical company—but what they’re going to do now is they’re going to say, ‘Well, we’ll just invest less in new medicines and then new treatments.’ And the rarer the disease, the less they’re going to invest in it. That’s probably one of the likely side products of this.
“But if that’s what they wanted this to be about, then we should have had a bill that had to do with pharmaceutical prices. We should have had a bill that reinstated the rebates and maybe some middle ground could have been found there. [Instead] they put in $380 billion for climate on things that will not benefit working people at all. They added all these new taxes. They hired 87,000 new [IRS] agents. They fought off every amendment that tried to improve the bill.
“They’re not helping the country, they’re certainly not helping working people. This is the most tone-deaf bill I’ve ever heard [of]. There’s a lot of angry people out there that woke up on Monday to the news that there are going to be 87,000 new IRS agents now ready to harass them and their small business.”
On legislative “wins” for the Biden Administration:
“As far as the legislative wins for Biden, Biden didn’t do anything on these things. The CHIPS Act—which didn’t have enough security, so now China is going to be able to steal all the stuff that we’re investing money in—was a legislative proposal worked on by a Republican [senator] in Indiana and [Senator] Chuck Schumer that’s been going on for two years. They started working on it before Biden was even elected.
“The burn pits legislation, the centerpiece of that bill, is a bill that I filed with Senator Gillibrand. I didn’t ask Joe Biden about it. We filed it before he was even president. We’ve been working on it.
“If he wants to take credit for this climate scam and 87,000 IRS agents, he deserves all the credit for pushing that. He should go out and campaign, and I hope he comes to Florida and campaigns on the fact that he’s going to hire 87,000 IRS agents to hassle and harass small businesses and working people. If he wants credit for that, I’ll give it to him.”