Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush told a South Carolina audience he limited the growth of government in the Sunshine State by vetoing legislation supported by Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who formerly served in the state’s legislature.
Bush painted Rubio as complicit with legislation that makes sure “your buddies get taken care of,” which the then-governor determined needed a veto.
“I was an equal opportunity vetoer,” Bush said. “I vetoed Republican projects. In fact, I vetoed a few of Marco Rubio’s. He didn’t take offense, he knew that it was the right thing to do. Many of the members of the legislature would kind of now that I was gonna do it. So they got credit for their trying to get the bacon back home, but they knew I was going to be righteous about this. This wasn’t about power being used to make sure your buddies get taken care of. This was about power being used to limit government so that our income could grow.”
Bush’s appearance in Anderson, S.C., contained several awkward moments, including when he chided South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham for adopting a Southern accent as Bush’s opening act. The former governor also stumbled through a portion of his stump speech about gun rights when he began to tout an award he never won.
Bush has previously erroneously claimed to have received the National Rifle Association’s “statesman of the year” award, which does not exist. The Bush campaign claimed the governor had “mistaken and conflated” the story, according to a BuzzFeed article from January, but the former governor struggled to talk about the Second Amendment without discussing his nonexistent award.
“When I was governor we had an A-plus rating in the NRA, eight straight years. One year I won the, I got the, I didn’t get an award. I was, we passed six bills protecting the Second Amendment,” Bush said.
Bush, who ranks fifth out of seven presidential candidates in the Washington Examiner‘s newest GOP presidential power rankings, will hold two public events in South Carolina on Friday.
