On Wednesday, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. joined Fox News’s “The Story” with Martha MacCallum to discuss Senate Democrats’s blocking police reform legislation after they blocked a vote to start debate on U.S. Sen. Tim Scott’s, R-SC, bill, “Just and Unifying Solutions to Invigorate Communities Everywhere (JUSTICE) Act” as well as the violent protests occurring across the nation and efforts to address racial inequalities.
Rubio weighed in on how Democrats blocked the JUSTICE Act this week.
“Let me tell you what exactly happened and I’ll tell you why it happened,” Rubio said. “They’re not even allowing the process to begin to make changes to it. What you do is you take a vote — it’s called a motion to proceed — and basically what it means is we are now on this bill. The process has begun… And then they can offer changes to the bill… If at the end of that process, they could kill it then. They refuse to even begin the process.”
Rubio said Democrats were looking ahead to November.
“They think they’re going to win the majority in the Senate. They think they’re going to win the White House. And in their mind, they want this issue for the campaign. They want to be able to now pass a bill in the House and say the Republicans refused to address it seriously. They want to campaign on it… That’s why they blocked it. It’s as simple as that,” Rubio insisted.
“And if people are reporting the truth, they will report that,” he added. “Because to argue that we can’t even begin to debate and make changes to a bill, that I think they would have passed a lot of their amendments, by the way, you can’t make that argument with a straight face, but that’s what they did.”
Rubio also weighed in on violent protests occurring across the nation and efforts to address racial inequalities.
“We have long and lingering racial inequities in this country that have been ignored for far too long and they need to be addressed…police reform, most certainly,” he said. “The relationship between African American communities and police departments in this country, in many places, is not a good one. It’s certainly not one built on trust and that needs to be addressed, and of course, we’ve seen these cases of abuses and those need to be addressed.
“Bad police officers need to be fired,” Rubio added. “If they’ve committed a crime, they need to be prosecuted. And police departments should be reformed. Not defunded, but reformed. That’s very different from some of these arguments that you’re hearing out there. I just don’t think those represent the views of the overwhelming majority of people…
“The overwhelming majority of the people that are marching and that are raising their voices, they’re asking for us to address these racial inequalities once and for all. And I think that is a majority position in America that we need to take action on and stop ignoring,” he continued.
Author
