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Washington, D.C. — U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined Hugh Hewitt to discuss the Paycheck Protection Program, the reopening of the economy, and reflecting on his decision to run for a second term in the Senate. See below for highlights.
On the Paycheck Protection Program saving jobs:
“Well, it’s still a work on progress, you know, but I think ultimately, when you put something together as quickly as we had to and had to be implemented as quickly as it needed to be, it certainly has exceeded those expectations as of today, and we have well over four million small businesses in this country that have received payroll support. And that represents tens of millions of jobs. We saw yesterday, ADP reported that there were 20 million private sector jobs in America that were eliminated in the month of April. I think that number would have been substantially higher had it not been for PPP. But now, obviously, we are looking into the future here and this is obviously going to be a longer term problem than we had hoped.”
On putting in place liability protections as the economy gradually reopens:
“It’s certainly relevant to what we’re working on in terms of getting small businesses support. They are by far the most vulnerable to that sort of activity. Look, we’re not talking about excusing gross negligence here… There are two hidden impediments to reopening parts of our economy. One is litigation and the other is schools… We’ve got two big impediments out there that we need to address for purposes of getting to some new normal until we have a vaccine.
“It’s no secret that the trial bar is a major contributor to the Democratic Party. In fact, this has been really grossly underreported, but there were efforts a month before this thing all broke open … to allow [N95 masks] to be mass produced … and it was blocked by Democrats on behalf of the trial bar who wanted to be able to sue and knew there was a liability issue there. Now ultimately, they relented, but my point is … it’s just an example of the hold the trial bar has on the Democratic Party… So I think the impediment really is getting it passed, not so much implementing it once it is.”
On bailing out states that have poorly managed their finances:
“There are two separate things here. Number one is money you owe, liabilities you have because of mismanagement and bad decisions. We should not be bailing that out. And then there is a sort of basic baseline of revenue that you need to pay firefighters, garbage pickup people, the sanitation department, and your building and code division, and your firefighters and police officers. There’s a baseline revenue there that we can’t allow to decline. That system of federalism relies on local governments providing these basic services. There’s a difference between funding those basic services, which they may need some help on, and extra money to help them service the debt they took on because they mismanaged their pension fund. It would be terrible precedent to use this crisis as an opportunity to allow them to come here and get bailed out for bad decisions on the pension side. But there is a baseline of operational revenue that local and state governments need to provide essential services, and that we cannot allow to collapse.”
On returning to the Senate for a second term:
“My second term has been much more rewarding and we’ve gotten a lot more done. I think a lot of that has to do with being in the majority in the Senate and obviously also having the White House — my relationship with the White House is very good and we’ve gotten a lot of things done, both in legislation and executive actions because of it… I’m very happy with the work we’ve been doing.”