Sen. Marco Rubio on Thursday night gave Sen. Bernie Sanders credit for helping to pass a law in 2014 aimed at making it easier to fire corrupt officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
But as it turns out, Sanders played a key role in adding language to the bill that has made it very difficult to fire VA officials, a result that Rubio complained about during the debate.
“In my time in the U.S. Senate, working with Jeff Miller here from Florida, in a bipartisan way, and I’ll give him credit, Bernie Sanders is a part of this, we passed the VA Accountability bill,” Rubio said at the GOP debate in Florida.
“[B]ecause of the law I passed, it gives the VA secretary the power to fire people that aren’t doing a good job,” he said. “The problem is no one is being held accountable. Even after we passed that law, no one’s been fired for no outreach, no one’s been fired for calls going to voicemail, no one’s been disciplined, no one’s been demoted.”
What Rubio forgets, however, is that Sanders played a key role in making it much harder to fire officials at the VA.
The bill as passed by the House in 2014 included language that gave the secretary the power to fire corrupt officials immediately, and gave those officials no recourse.
But once the bill went to the Senate, Sanders, who chaired the Senate committee in charge of veterans issues, insisted on language that watered down the House plan. Specifically, Sanders pushed hard for language that gave officials a 21-day period they could use to appeal a decision that they should be terminated.
As it’s been implemented, the appeal process has allowed most VA officials to avoid being fired. Many have used it to overturn the VA’s decision that they should be fired.
In other cases, the appeal process has made it more difficult to fire these officials. For example, the appeals process has at times overturned decisions to fire VA officials because of their role it the healthcare scandal, but leaned on other, unrelated reasons to fire them.
Appeals are heard by the Merit Systems Protection Board, which early on indicated it doesn’t favor the 2014 because it could make it harder for people to serve at the will of the president. The board went so far as to suggest that the law might be unconstitutional.
According to the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, only three VA workers have been officially fired because of their role in the healthcare scandal.
Rubio has fallen in the polls, but he said if he becomes president, he would work to ensure that VA officials can finally be fired.
“When I’m president of the United States, if you work at the VA and you are not doing a good job, you will be fired from our job at the VA,” Rubio said.
