Senator Marco Rubio said Monday that he didn’t want “politics to intrude” upon discussion of this weekend’s terrorist attack in his home state. But when pressed by conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, the Florida Republican suggested he is rethinking his decision not to run for reelection to the U.S. Senate.
“When it visits your home state, when it impacts a community you know well, it really gives you pause to think a little bit about your service to your country, and where you can be most useful to your country,” Rubio told Hewitt, who asked about how the Sunday nightclub shooting in Orlando could make him rethink his political plans.
The attack prompted Hewitt to call on Rubio to reconsider running for his seat again. “[T]here are people who know this issue. You are one of them,” the host told Rubio. “Very few people know this issue as you do, and I hope your service extends.”
Rubio’s term ends in January, and a handful of Republicans—including his friend and Florida lieutenant governor Carlos Lopez-Cantera—are running to succeed him. With Donald Trump at the top of the ticket and Republican concern the contest will be tight, Rubio has publicly resisted calls to run for reelection to help boost the GOP’s chances of retaining the seat. Hewitt gave Rubio a different reason to reconsider, one that had nothing to do with electoral politics.
Rubio “has made a priority of national security since his arrival in Washington in January 2011,” as THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s Stephen F. Hayes wrote in 2014. Rubio is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations and Intelligence Committees, and was the most prominent Republican hawk running for president this year. He called the campaign’s increased focus in the fall on national security a “positive development,” and he was the one who explained the nuclear triad to Donald Trump in a December debate. (Awkwardly, Rubio is also the reluctant Trump endorser who still doesn’t the trust the presumptive GOP nominee with the nuclear launch codes.)
And now, he’s warning of the dangers posed by the homegrown terrorism of the Orlando nightclub shooter.
“There are hundreds of people like this that we’re watching all across the country that pose this threat. It’s a really emerging threat that is very dangerous—the hardest terrorist threat we’ve ever confronted in the history of this country,” Rubio said Sunday on CNN.
The deadline for filing as a candidate in the Senate primary is June 24.
