The border crisis is ‘100% fueled by this administration and people like Val Demings that support these crazy policies’
MIAMI, FLA. — Senator Marco Rubio joined Bay News 9 Tampa Bay’s Holly Gregory for Political Connections to discuss his race against Congresswoman Val Demings, inflation, the border crisis, Disney, and more.
To watch the video, click below or HERE.
On Disney
I think there’s two separate issues. One is why does Reedy Creek exist and why is it justified? I’ve actually asked myself that in the past before all this happened. But if it is justified and there’s a really good reason for it I think Disney will have an opportunity to make that argument. I think the broader argument isn’t just about the woke part. I think the broader argument is this. You have companies like Disney as an example that benefit greatly from being in Florida, that benefit greatly from this treatment under the law and that benefit greatly from being of American origin. And yet they also benefit greatly from the work they do – they have a park in China and they never said a word about China. But if they don’t like what some democratically elected legislature does in a state like Florida, then they throw the full weight of their corporate power against those people in the criticisms and in their attacks.
And so I think when you do those sorts of things, I think you remind people and you ask yourself, well, why or why do we treat them any differently than we do any other company in Florida? And I think that’s what’s happened here and there’s real anger at it. I think this is limited to Disney. I think there are many other corporations out there that have chosen the same route. At the end of the day, I think that frankly, if companies are going to behave this way then I think they should be prepared to sort of justify why they think they deserve special treatment within the law.
On Inflation
First of all Tampa is at 10 [percent inflation] I think the federal level is at eight so it’s high, two points higher, which is pretty substantial. And what this means is people who got raises or whatever it just ate that up and blew it up and you see it every single day and everything costs more. There is literally nothing at this point that you don’t pay a lot more for. What’s behind it is pretty simple when they used to teach economics in schools.
This is very simple, it’s a supply and demand issue. There’s less supply because we outsourced all of our jobs, all of our factories, all the component pieces, sent them to China, sent them to other countries because we decided at some point twenty years ago that it wasn’t important. And the demand is greater because we have flooded, flooded the market and the economy again. Last March a 1.7 trillion government dollars poured into the economy and then an infrastructure package on top of that. So you have more dollars of government money blowing that up, chasing limited goods. There is no easy, short-term answer, but it’s something that the administration should have taken seriously last year when we were warning about it and they didn’t. They said it was transitory, was going to go away. They downplayed it. Now it’s real.
Those are the drivers and the solution is to make more things in America or at least closer to america. Let’s not continue to be so dependent on making so many important things in places like China. I include Vietnam and these other countries in Asia as well.
On Gas Prices
Val Demings gave you silly answers.
Number one, the President already tapped the reserves. Those reserves are there in time of war, but you can’t lower the gas prices with the reserves. That’s designed for an emergency for two weeks. That was after the oil embargo. But that wouldn’t solve the problem and not even Biden claims that it would solve the problem. I don’t know what “hold the oil companies accountable” means. I don’t know what she means by that. I can tell you this is very simple, oil prices are set in the global market and they’re set in the global market by availability. The more oil that’s available and produced the lower the prices.
There’s less on the market for two reasons because we stopped producing. Today, America pumps 1.2 million barrels a day less than we did in 2019 and the Saudis and OPEC stop producing cause they want the price to be higher. So we basically unilaterally disarmed. The answer is for America to be able to produce more oil again. And publicly, Biden says he’s against it. But now privately behind the backs of the left, he’s now starting to say, well, we’re going to be permitting a little bit more and you start to get some blowback from the Green New Deal people. So look, they don’t have an answer because they created this problem because it’s a fantasy. I’m all for doing everything that has to do with renewables. That’s all great. But you can’t power the economy right now with just renewables and this other stuff. You need to have oil. You need to have natural gas. We’re blessed with both. We should be producing more. That’s the answer.
On Food Shortages
What the pandemic and the war have been a good reminder of is how things that happen halfway around the world have an impact on us. So Ukraine I believe is the second or third largest wheat producer in the world, pretty substantial corn producer, as well. Them in combination with the Russians are one of the leading producers of potash which is used in fertilizer. And so even though we don’t buy from them, if there’s less wheat in the world, the wheat supply is lower, the price of it goes up and this is not something you can just turn the knob on and produce more, there’s growing seasons and harvest for it. So we could potentially see some higher prices as a result of it. But that’s a different dynamic and a very serious one from the initial one we talked about when it comes to oil and natural gas.
The reason why Europe, the reason why Vladimir Putin invades Ukraine is because Europe embraced a bunch of crazy policies on energy, dependent on Russia for natural gas and the Russians thought, well we have leverage over them now is the time to act. Fifty percent of the natural gas in Germany, for example, came from Russia. So they moved. Obviously it didn’t turn out well for the Russians, but that’s the calculus they made. I think it’s crazy that we have leaders that have left our nation vulnerable to China, to Russia, to Iran on oil and natural gas.
On Crime
Well, a couple things that are behind it. The first I think is a couple years ago we had leaders including Val Demings and others that sort of joined this chorus of attacking law enforcement criticizing the second guessing law enforcement. And the result of it created this spirit of “We can do things because law enforcement will get blamed for it if we interact with them and it turns out negative.” That’s number one.
Number two is, in many parts of this country they perceive these policies of “We’re not going to prosecute certain crimes.” Certain prosecutors will not prosecute certain crimes. Early release: let’s let people out of jail early because we don’t think their crime was that serious or because of covid whatever it may be. So if we know that there’s a high level of recidivism in general among people that committed crimes in the past, you release more of them into the streets, into streets that now believe that the consequences of breaking the law are not as high as they used to be, you’re going to get more crime. And that’s what we now see on top of a growing lack of total respect for law enforcement.
A few weeks ago I was at a CVS and the clerk was telling me some guy walked in to steal a bunch of wine right in front of her. And she confronted the guy says, “Go ahead, call the police, they’re not going to do anything to me.” As if he’s done this multiple times and actually had the audacity to come back and ask for plastic bags to put the wine that he stole in. These people are facing this every single day now. I mean, you go to most stores they’ve got stuff, you can’t even buy a razor anymore, it’s locked up behind something, they keep locking things up. People just come in and clean off the shelves because they believe that if somebody calls the police, the police isn’t going to do anything about it, because they want to deal with the hassle that might come with that. That’s fueling a lot of this, and that leads, of course, to more violent crimes later.
On the Border
Gregory: Do we have operational control of our southern border?
Rubio: We do not. Look, the same networks that are used to bring in people are used to bring drugs. In fact, bringing in the drugs is easier and what’s really insidious about it is all the precursors are actually made in china. China sends them to Mexico… including these machines that actually make pills so they can actually stamp you a pill that looks like a percocet or a vicodin but it’s actually fentanyl. Someone buys it online or from the street, they think they’re taking vicodin or percocet, they’re taking fentanyl. They’re dead. They’re fueling it and we know it.
So if you have a border in which all of your agents are dealing with, the fact that we’ve got 6,000 people a day coming across and you got to process that, it just creates the opportunity for more of this to come across. The same networks that are trafficking the people are trafficking the drugs. And they are deliberately targeting America. I’m convinced that part of this is China’s revenge on America. Part of this is can they undermine our culture, addicting and killing as many Americans in society as possible. They believe it harms the country. There’s no doubt in my mind that this is by design.
On Title 42
What Title 42 does is it basically says that now if you cross the border illegally, you turn yourself in, you can say “I’m here” and the magic words of asylum. They have to process you and release you. Those people will then call home and say “This is how I got in.”and more people will come. So it’ll absolutely fuel it.
We know, for example, there are upwards of close to 200,000 people within one days’ walking distance of the border, poised and ready for that Title 42 to go away. That’s something, by the way, Val Demings supported. She wrote a letter. I know she told in a previous interview or she said yesterday she wasn’t for it anymore. She is. She wrote a letter, signed her name on a letter, to Joe Biden asking him to get rid of Title 42. Well here it is. And we saw yesterday in court that ICE told a federal judge we are preparing to apprehend and release 600,000 illegal immigrants in the next five months. That’s going to happen. We’ve never seen a crisis like that before. 100% fueled by this administration and people like Val Demings that support these crazy policies.
On the Threat of China
Well, I don’t know if it’s about fear. I think it’s more about concern that we’re not waking up in time to figure out the fact that China has a well designed plan to supplant America as the world’s most powerful country. They’ve been working on it for twenty years while we’re arguing about silly and trivial things, they’re focused on that. Across the board. They steal our research. They steal our intellectual property, they hack into our computers and steal it that way. They steal our companies. They steal our jobs, are building up their military. They’re fueling disinformation. They use our corporations as lobbyists on their behalf.
I don’t know anyone in Congress that’s worked harder against them than I have. I have the Taiwan bill, the Uyghur bill, the Hong Kong bill. The Chinese Communist Party hates me so much, I believe I’m one of the few, one of the only members of Congress that’s been banned and sanctioned by the Chinese government. And I’m proud of that, it’s a badge of honor. But that’s going to be the challenge of the 21st century. That’s going to define the 21st century: the relationship between the United States and China. And we keep messing around and not focusing on it, and our kids are going to wake up in a world in which the most powerful country in the world is a totalitarian communist dictatorship, not the United States of America.