Wednesday on Fox News Channel’s “The Story,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) gave his version of Senate Democrats effort earlier in the day to block a police reform bill brought by his colleague, Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC).
According to Rubio, efforts to solve problems with law enforcement would undermine Democrats’ use of the issue in the campaign for the November elections.
“Let me tell you exactly what happened, and I’ll tell you why it happened,” he said. “What happened — so everyone understands this. The Democrats are not blocking the Republican bill. They’re not even allowing the process to begin to make changes to it. So 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 amendments. We can negotiate amendments. They can offer changes to the bill. If, at the end of that process, they are not happy with the end result, they could kill it then. They refuse to even begin that process.”
“And their answer is pretty transparent, OK?” Rubio continued. “We all know what’s happening here. 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, and then they think they can get a better bill once they’re in power. And that’s why they blocked it. It’s as simple as that. And if you’re — people are reporting the truth, they will report that 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, that you can’t make that argument with a straight face and — but that’s what they did.”
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