| MIAMI, FLA. — Today, Marco Rubio joined NBC 6 Impact with Jackie Nespral to discuss his race against Val Demings, Biden’s student loan bailout, Demings’ radical support of abortion up until the moment of birth, and more. Click HERE or below to watch. |
| On the Contrast Between Him and Val Demings “No one has gotten more done in the Senate over the last six years than I have. And that’s not me saying it: the University of Virginia, YouGov, two independent entities have found that. The Paycheck Protection Program that saved millions of jobs in this country and small businesses and not-for-profit organizations, I wrote that bill, personally wrote it, passed it, named it, helped implement it. That was my bill. The VA Accountability Act. The recent burn pits legislation. The sanctions on imported products made by slaves from Uyghur Muslim slaves in China. The Hong Kong legislation to take on China. A law that requires pharmaceuticals to do research and provide drugs for pediatric cancer. The list goes on and on. It’s long, it’s extensive. I look forward to talking about it. That’s not to mention the fact that my constituent service was rated number one in the country. So I’m the most effective Senator in Washington, gotten more done. “Val Demings has never passed a bill, even with her party in charge she’s never passed a bill. I’ve passed more bills with my name on it that I got done this year alone with a Democrat President and a Democrat Congress than she has in her six years in Congress. She has not a single legislative achievement. So I think when people continue to learn or be reminded of that, they’ll see there’s a stark difference between a do-nothing Congresswoman that votes with Pelosi 100% of the time and someone who actually gets things done for Florida.” On PPP vs. Biden’s Student Loan Bailout “It’s not even the same thing. A PPP loan didn’t go to the business. The business didn’t make money off it. The PPP loans were designed to pay their workers. So the only thing you could use PPP money were to pay the salaries of your workers or the rent on your building so you wouldn’t get evicted. That was it. If we hadn’t done that then all of those workers would have been laid off or fired and they would have gone on the unemployment rolls. So we were going to pay for it either way. So the question is, what is the better way to get money to workers, who are not being allowed to work, by the way. That’s the other thing you have to remember about PPP: the government was telling businesses ‘You’re not allowed to open. You’re not allowed to work.’ We were either going to do it through unemployment or through this program. So that’s the difference. I’m not against student loan reforms…. “I’m against a loan forgiveness that basically tells 85% of Americans that they have to pay off the loans of 15% of the Americans, just pay them off with their tax dollars. So if you’re a plumber or you’re an electrician and you borrowed money from a bank to start a business and hire people, you don’t get your loan forgiven. But if you go to a university or a college that’s too expensive to begin with, maybe you even graduate, and we have to pay off the loan you took out? What about the people that paid off their loans? What about the students that are taking out loans today? Right now someone’s taking out a loan, that loan’s not going to be forgiven. Why one group of people and not everyone else? “The better approach is what I’ve been proposing for five years. Let’s get rid of the interest rates. Wipe out interest rates on loans and just say there’s a flat fee so they don’t compound. You don’t have to make money on student loans, work with the fee that we need to break even. That would help a lot of people lower the burden because what happens with these loans is they start compounding with the interest rates. “The other is, before you take out a loan, the college or university has to tell you, ‘This is how much people make when they graduate from our school with this degree.’ So you can make a decision about whether you want to borrow $50,000 to graduate with something that doesn’t lead to a job. These are bipartisan reforms. They would help reform the system and they would help people from the past and moving forward. But loan forgiveness is basically 85% of Americans paying the loans of 15%.” On Insulin Costs “Because there’s a better way to do it and the Democrats voted against it. Donald Trump had put in place when he was President a rebate, a rebate that goes directly to the consumer that would have lowered the price of insulin by even more than what the Democrat plan did. We actually offered an amendment to change the bill to lower insulate rates. They voted against it because it was Trump’s idea. But one of the first things that Biden did is get rid of that rebate, wipe it out. And so now you actually are going to pay more than you would under what Trump put in place and you have to swallow all this other stuff.” On the Inflation ‘Reduction’ Act “The other thing is you don’t just vote for that in a bill. If you vote for that, you have to also vote for 87,000 IRS agents. You have to also vote for $400 billion for credits for electric cars and solar panels that do nothing to lower inflation or help Americans. Why would I vote for a bill that does all those terrible things, especially when we have a better way of lowering pharmaceutical prices that actually lower them more and doesn’t come with that other stuff? “That’s the rebate plan that I outlined, that rebate plan was in place, we offered to put it back in, they wiped it out, as soon as they took over they wiped out the Trump rebate. That rebate plan would have actually led to cheaper, for lower income Americans, cheaper insulin than what they’re going to pay under what the Democrats put forward.” On Inflation “Well the first thing is nothing to make it worse. If you have a supply problem, which is what we have. We don’t produce enough oil, gas. We rely too much on things made in China. The last thing you do is pump trillions of dollars into the economy to create more demand. You have more demand, less supply, you’re going to get higher prices. The same is true for oil and natural gas. Gas is the cornerstone cost of everything. When gas goes up, when diesel goes up, the price of transport goes up, the price of everything goes up. Food, clothing, you name it. “Why do the prices go up? For two reasons. One, because we have an administration that stopped the production of more oil and natural gas, and they stopped it by telling the industry, ‘We’re going to put you out of business.’ By telling banks not to lend money to fossil fuel companies. And we also have lost all of our refining capacity because you don’t put oil in a car, you put gas in. Gasoline is refined oil. They’re not going to build any new refineries and they shut down a bunch of them because the industry is being told, ‘We’re going to put you out of business in ten years.’ That is the cornerstone of everything else. “The other thing is, and this takes time to do, we have to make more things in America, we can’t keep depending on China to make all these products, charge whatever they want, import it here, and if they get disrupted, we have shortages, like what we see now, particularly in things like textiles.” On Val Demings’ Extreme Position on Abortion “There’s nothing in the Constitution about abortion and that’s all the Supreme Court said. The Supreme Court said there’s nothing in the Constitution about abortion. This is an issue that needs to be decided at the state legislative level just like anything else. In fact, before she passed away, Ruth Bader Ginsburg made the same argument in some ways. She argued had that process been allowed to continue, America would have found closure one way or the other on that issue. And Roe v. Wade sort of stepped in, invented a constitutional right that didn’t exist, and created 40 years of division over that issue. “So now states will decide. New York going to have different abortion laws. Florida, in Florida, abortions are illegal after four months. If people don’t like that decision, they’ll have elections for the state legislature, and for governor, the statewide officers. You don’t have any influence over the Supreme Court. you can’t vote for a Supreme Court Justice. Plus it’s not in the Constitution. What I think is ironic, though, is Democrats are never asked, ‘What restrictions on abortion do they support?’ “My opponent Val Demings will not tell you what she supports as a restriction. “I believe innocent human life is worthy of the protection of our laws, but I have voted and would vote for bills, if I were in the state legislature that had restrictions because I’m in support of any bill that saves lives. The overwhelming majority of abortions occur outside of some of these commonly discussed. I know it’s not a majority position, many people probably don’t agree with me, you probably couldn’t pass it and that’s why Florida did a four month. But I certainly think what Florida passed, something I would have voted for while I was in the legislature, is a very reasonable law, after four months. But people like Val Demings believe abortion should be paid by tax payers, at any time, including potentially the day the child is due for delivery. That’s an outrageous position because, and you have to have that position if you’re endorsed by Planned Parenthood and NARAL the way she is. “To me, it’s a moral issue about life and about what life should be protected. I don’t diminish the fact that people have a right to control what happens to their body. The problem here is there’s two bodies in place. One is human life that I believe our laws should protect at some level and most Americans would tell you this is a majority position that after four months, that life should be protected. Our laws already recognize that. “If tonight God forbid some pregnant woman is killed by a reckless driver, that driver’s going to be facing two charges of vehicular homicide, one for the mother and one for the unborn child. Our laws already recognize that as a human life. All you’re now doing is applying that in the abortion realm. That’s what Florida has done. Other states will probably have different laws, including laws that are much more permissive. And those states will take that into account.” On the Raid at Mar-a-Lago “Number one: because there is the fundamental question of separation of powers. This is really at its core a storage argument that they’re making. They’re arguing there are documents there, they don’t deny that he should have access to those documents…. I don’t think a fight over storage of documents is worthy of what they’ve done, which is full scale raid and then these constant leaks. That’s the second problem. It’s the PR behind all this. “There’s no doubt [the leaks are] from the Justice Department. The articles say, ‘Officials in the Justice Department are saying this and that.’ Generally when the federal government is investigating someone they won’t even acknowledge it’s there is an investigation. They won’t even talk about it. They’re actually leaking information that may or may not be true, they’re putting out pictures, making it look like there are all these papers thrown around, classified information. “But the other point is a bipartisan one. Mark Warner, the Democrat Chairman, and I’m the Vice Chairman of Intelligence, wrote a letter to the Justice Department saying, ‘What you guys are alleging here is a very serious counterintelligence threat yet you have an obligation to keep us informed of counterintelligence threats.’ All they’ve responded is, ‘We’re reviewing the documents. We’ll let you know.’ A non-answer. The truth is, they never came before the Intelligence Committee or the Gang of 8, the top leaders in Congress, myself included, on intelligence matters, and told us, ‘We have a very dangerous and severe counter-intelligence threat in Mar-a-Lago.’ We were never informed of that. And they inform us of all kinds of sensitive things, but not that…. Now it seems like it’s political. And no matter what, half the country believes it was political which undermines the credibility of important agencies.” |