Source: United States Senator for Florida Marco Rubio
Washington, D.C. — U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined Orlando Morning News to discuss on 107.3 FM and 580 AM to discuss President Joe Biden’s election power grab and low approval ratings, along with other news of the day.
On the Democrats’ power grab to federalize elections:
“We have a raging crisis in the country but it’s not about voting rights. I don’t need to convince you that everything costs more. It’s eating up whatever pay raise you got – if you got one – is gone. I was at Publix on Saturday and I went to buy… I forgot what it was, I think a soft drink, and there was an entire shelf that was empty. There was nothing there and that’s just a small-scale example. This is devastating to small businesses. That’s the crisis. Why aren’t we focused on that?
“[The Democrats] are focused on this [voting bill] for two reasons. Number one, they want to distract you from [inflation]. They don’t talk about that. They certainly don’t want to talk about COVID. It’s been a year now and [President Joe Biden] hasn’t solved it. It’s actually gotten worse. He doesn’t talk about that.
“The other [reason] is power. This is about power. These guys want power. They want the power to pass their agenda. If they want to change the Senate rules, they can do that. They want power to make sure it’s easier than ever to win elections, especially in court. They think if they can inject election chaos, they can win in court. This is not about these laws that were passed in the states.
“Remember a lot of these changes to voting laws were all done as emergency COVID procedures, right? [2020 was the year where] people have COVID. We didn’t want them standing in line at the polls. It was supposed to be short-term and emergency [measures] and now they want to make these permanent. If you don’t make them permanent then you’re a segregationist, so people see through it, to the extent they’re even paying attention.
“I know a lot of people back home in the real world that don’t even know Biden gave a speech on Monday. I don’t know if they even realize we’re having this debate right now because they’re too busy living real-life.”
On Biden’s dropping approval rating amongst Americans:
“An overwhelming majority of Americans think Joe Biden is a disaster. There’s just 11% of them that don’t have the heart to tell him. Another 33% just don’t want to admit it.
“Do I think this is pressure on [Biden]? Yes, there’s no doubt he’s being pressured. This is an incompetent administration. There’s no other way to say it. I don’t say that happily because it has foreign policy and national security ramifications. He hasn’t gotten a single thing right in a year. It’s been failure after failure, disaster after disaster.
“[The Democrats] are not going to get Build Back Socialist. They’re not going to get some of the things they want. So now they’ve pivoted to this. I hope we can defeat them on this as well because it would be bad for the country. That’s what this is about.
“There’s other things happening here. Chuck Schumer of New York is afraid, he’s terrified of being primaried by the ultra left in New York. So he’s got to do it and he’s bringing his conference down with him.”
On his new bill to implement sanctions on China and find out where COVID came from:
“We’re probably never going to know how this originated unless some documents are leaked or someone escapes and tells the world.
“My theory is — I’m not saying this is the absolute truth, but I’m well informed on the topic for a variety of reasons — that they were messing around with experiments in a lab, someone got infected, maybe in a cave messing around with bats, maybe in the lab trying to create a virus that had never been in humans, but they’re trying to get ahead of it. They manufactured a virus that would be infectious in humans — not to infect humans — but to come up with a cure for this gain of function stuff. The person got infected, it spread, and the people at the lab said, ‘I’m not telling Beijing because we’re going to get fired, maybe executed. You’ll never hear from us again.’ So no one reported it.
“The Chinese authorities probably know that by now, but they’re never going to admit that to the world totalitarian regimes don’t admit mistakes. That’s how you got your Chernobyl and that’s how you have this I think.”
On the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing:
“I would bifurcate that into two things. I don’t want to punish athletes. My hope is that they go up there, win a lot of medals, and embarrass China. The other is we’ve got to make sure that if our athletes decide they’re going to wear shoes or say something about Tibet or Uyghurs or whatever might be, are we going to be having athletes arrested or kicked out of the country? That’s one of the concerns I have that we have to start talking about.
“I think there are going to be athletes that go to Beijing and that speak out about some issue that China doesn’t like and what’s going to happen to those guys? Are they going to cut off the NBC telecast to not show that image? Are they going to try to censor our media? What’s our media going to do? Are they going to go and follow along with the Chinese rules and not report on things? That’s the one thing to keep an eye on.
“I don’t want to punish the athletes but we’ve got to be in a position and prepared because I do think we’ve got some athletes that could either be banned from entering the country or get themselves in trouble. This is an Olympics being hosted by a genocidal government. There’s no other way to say it.”
On the current status of the pandemic and the Omicron variant:
“COVID is a bad thing. I know people personally who have died. I think in the early days of this pandemic we were right to be freaked out about it because we didn’t know what it was. We didn’t know how to stop it. We know a lot more about it now. We know how to treat it.
“I think the bad news is that we have this now dominant strain, which is almost unavoidable. Some people get mad when I say that, but an increasing number of experts are telling you everyone’s going to get it at some point or be exposed, maybe even get infected because I think it’s just really contagious.
“The good news is that a less deadly, less severe strain has displaced a more deadly, more severe strain but it’s spreading really fast. That means we’re going to get to a peak very quickly and then it should drop from there. When it’s all said and done, we should have a substantial majority of Americans that are either vaccinated or have had COVID — some twice — and maybe both.
“As far as the numbers are concerned… if you have something spreading that fast, you’re going to have a lot of people with it. Even if it’s less severe, if a larger number of people have it — even if it’s a small percentage, they get really sick — the gross number might be significant. I think it’s also important to point out that a lot of the people that they’re reporting as COVID patients are not in the hospital for COVID. That doesn’t mean it’s not a strain on the hospital, but it’s a pretty good indicator how severe this thing is.
“The bottom line is COVID probably going to become endemic and be with us forever. We’re going to have to learn how to live with managed risks the same way as we manage the risk of dying in a car accident, getting hit by lightning, or getting poisoned, whatever it might be.
“There are just inherent risks in life that we have to manage and do the best we can. We can’t stop living and it’s time to get back to some level of normalcy. Because we have to and because people just aren’t going to comply after two years with some of these restrictions that have taken away what life is all about.”
On the future of the failing Democratic party:
“I think it’s pretty amazing that the party that claims to be the party of young America and the future of America can’t find anyone under 80 to run for president.
“I think that includes Senate leadership. I don’t think there’s anyone under 75 that’s running anything in the Democratic party. I think it speaks to the fact that this failed party — at the end of the day — it’s a very top-down driven thing.
“The interest groups that control the Democratic party are much more powerful than any interest group that oversees Republicans. You see it in their agenda. This agenda they’re pursuing now, it’s not a majority agenda. It’s the agenda of a now sliver of deranged lunatics who have commandeered the Democratic party’s agenda.
“There’s a bunch of senators here [on Capitol Hill] that think this is crazy. Democratic senators think this is crazy. They’re not going to say anything about it because they’re going to get primaried, they’re going to lose their donor base, and they’re going to get smeared.
“Look at how they’re attacking Manchin and Sinema – and there’s a couple of other senators in the same place as Manchin and Sinema, but they’re just not talking about it. They’re not talking about it because they don’t want to deal with being chased into bathrooms like Sinema was a few months ago.”