Marco Rubio has become quick to accuse his fellow Republicans of aiding the world’s most notorious terrorist organization. “If ISIS had lobbyists in Washington, they would have spent millions to support the anti-intelligence law that was just passed with the help of some Republicans now running for president,” Rubio said in foreign policy speech delivered Monday in Hooksett, New Hampshire.
The “anti-intelligence law” to which Rubio referred is the USA Freedom Act, passed in June 2015. It restricts the National Security Agency’s collection of so-called metadata from Americans’ phone records, a controversial part of the nation’s post-9/11 anti-terrorist strategy. Rubio has said the Freedom Act “weakens U.S. national security by outlawing the very programs our intelligence community and the FBI have used to protect us time and time again.”
Some of Rubio’s Republican colleagues, like him strong on national security, disagree. Among them is Ted Cruz, who voted for the USA Freedom Act and is now Rubio’s rival in the presidential race and the apparent main target of the “some Republicans now running for president” jab in Monday’s speech.
On the campaign trail, Rubio has been citing the USA Freedom Act to accuse Cruz of weakening national security. Now, Rubio has escalated his attack, saying Cruz and ISIS were on the same side with the legislation.
Beyond going wildly over the top, has Rubio looked at who else voted for the USA Freedom Act? There are a lot of Republicans — conservatives whose support Rubio will need in this campaign — who acted, in Rubio’s telling, in concert with those imaginary ISIS lobbyists.
The bill passed by a vote of 67 to 32 in the Senate and 338 to 88 in the House.
Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley voted for the USA Freedom Act. Rubio’s ISIS-would-support-that-bill accusation surely can’t sit well with the senior GOP senator in the nation’s first-voting state. (The other Iowa Republican in the Senate, Joni Ernst, voted against the bill.)
Iowa’s three-member Republican House delegation split on the bill, with Rep. David Young voting for it, and Reps. Steve King (a Cruz endorser) and Rod Blum against it.
In New Hampshire, the only Republican senator, Kelly Ayotte, voted for the USA Freedom Act. She most likely does not feel that she did the bidding of imagined ISIS lobbyists. (New Hampshire’s only Republican congressman, Frank Guinta, voted against the bill.)
In South Carolina, Sen. Tim Scott, a key figure in that state’s presidential politics, voted for the Freedom Act. He, too, most likely does not feel he did ISIS’s bidding. The state’s other senator, Lindsey Graham, did not vote, although he surely would have voted against the bill.
South Carolina has six Republican members of the House. They split evenly, with Trey Gowdy, Joe Wilson, and Tom Rice voting yes, and Mark Sanford, Mick Mulvaney, and Jeff Duncan voting no. (It should be noted that some of the “no” votes in the House were from Republicans who felt the bill did not go far enough in restricting government surveillance, the opposite of Rubio’s position.)
Gowdy not only voted for the USA Freedom Act, he was one of the bill’s original co-sponsors in the House. That is remarkable, because Rubio was absolutely delighted recently to win Gowdy’s endorsement, even bringing Gowdy to Iowa to speak at Rubio events. And now, Rubio portrays those who voted for the Freedom Act as somehow helping ISIS by passing a bill the terrorist organization would surely support.
Again: “If ISIS had lobbyists in Washington, they would have spent millions to support the anti-intelligence law that was just passed with the help of some Republicans now running for president,” Rubio said.
Obviously, Rubio was including Sen. Rand Paul among those “some Republicans.” But there’s no doubt Cruz is a bigger target than the fading Paul. And the same is true for another part of the speech in which Rubio said, “We have isolationist candidates who are apparently more passionate about weakening our military and intelligence capabilities than they are about destroying our enemies.”
It’s an understatement to say that Ted Cruz is not universally liked among Republicans. But it’s also hard to see how Rubio could convince many GOP voters, even those who don’t support Cruz, that Cruz is somehow soft on national defense. And yet that is apparently what Rubio hopes to do.
In the third Republican debate, Rubio memorably smacked down Jeb Bush after Bush clumsily attacked Rubio’s Senate attendance record. “The only reason why you’re doing it now is because we’re running for the same position, and someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you,” Rubio said to Bush.
Now Rubio is swinging wildly at Cruz, because they’re running for the same position and, perhaps, because someone has convinced him that doing so will help him. It seems hard to believe it will.
