Rubio rebuts Obama’s shutdown “victory”

After a Thursday statement by President Obama declaring victory in Washington’s latest fiscal fight, Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio rebutted that any political victory does little to solve the real deficit problems plaguing the country.

“If this is about scoring political points and impressing journalists and impressing columnists, I’m sure the White House feels pretty good this morning,” Rubio said on Fox following the president’s address.

“I think that people are all focused on this Washington manufactured shutdown and Washington manufactured drama of the month – we can’t forget that the real crisis is still there,” Rubio said describing the growing $17 trillion national debt.

“I’ve been here three years and nothing has been done to seriously address that – and nothing was done last night to seriously address that,” Rubio said. “It gets harder to solve as time goes on.”

The Florida tea party favorite, who has been missing in media action for the majority of Capitol Hill’s three-week shutdown showdown, was one of 18 Senators – all Republican – that voted against the Wednesday night bipartisan Senate plan to reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling.

“I didn’t come here to take symbolic positions, I came here to make a difference,” Rubio said. “If in fact we continue on the path we’re on, we’re going to lose the American dream, we’re going to lose what makes America special, and we’re all going to have to answer for that – all of us, Republicans and Democrats.”

Other dissenting voters included popular tea party colleagues Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who the majority of Republicans blame for leading the failed shutdown fight without a planned strategy.

“There will come a day where we are going to have a real debt crisis – not because Congress can’t pass a bill, but because no one will lend us money,” Rubio said.

“The deficit is getting smaller, not bigger. It’s going down faster than it has in the last 50 years,” President Obama said from the White House Thursday morning before citing burgeoning deficit bubbles like Medicare and Social security as the long term problems the nation needs to address.

Rubio agreed, but said the president is doing little to address those problems, “because the radical left-wing base of his own party refuses to consider any structural reforms to those programs, and they accuse anyone who’s in favor of making those types of changes of being anti-senior.”

Those ideas resurfaced in the latest shutdown fight via a proposal from Wisconsin Republican and Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan which included Social Security and Medicare reforms like higher premiums and great personal retirement input from federal employees.

Ryan’s plan would also have lowered tax rates while simultaneously broadening the base of taxpayers. Both parties cite all four issues as unsustainable at current levels – regardless, Ryan’s plan was ignored by his own House caucus in favor of another to defund Obamacare, which failed several times.

While concluding his speech the president renewed the call to Congress to take up immigration reform – an issue strongly supported by Rubio, who co-wrote and sponsored the bill passed in the Senate this summer, much to the chagrin of his tea party base.

“We need to give them the time and space to figure out what they can support,” Rubio said of the House of Representatives, which has yet to seriously take up the reform legislation.

“There are other areas that are going to be more difficult to find consensus on, quite frankly even more difficult now given the lack of trust in government, and the way that this White House and the Democrats have behaved over the last three weeks,” Rubio said.

Giuseppe Macri is a national political correspondent for Rare. Follow Giuseppe on Twitter.

Related articles

• Rubio to Obama: ‘You’re not the chairman of the Democratic Party…Act like the president of the United States’ (postonpolitics.com)
• Marco Rubio: The Great Houdini (tv.msnbc.com)
• Marco Rubio will not vote for budget that “spends one single cent on Obamacare” (redalertpolitics.com)