On Wednesday’s broadcast of FNC’s “Fox & Friends,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) backed up an earlier call from Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) to move container ships sitting in limbo offshore near the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach to Florida, where Rubio insisted those ships could be offloaded.
The Florida Republican U.S. Senator blamed California and California’s burdensome regulations for the tie-up.
“I think in the short-term the answer is, yes, [we can reroute through the Panama Canal]. I think in the long-term, one of the things we should be working on — strategically — is bringing more of this production to places where they make things out of Asia, out of China, and to the United States if possible,” he said. “But, if not, we have plenty of countries in this hemisphere that could use jobs.”
“Imagine if we had a bunch of factories that couldn’t be in America, but could be in Honduras, Guatemala, Haiti, or in the Dominican Republic,” Rubio continued. “It would create jobs. People wouldn’t have to leave those countries. They wouldn’t have to turn themselves over to these trafficking networks that abuse them as they bring them to the United States. It would bring products a lot closer to the United States. In terms of getting it in through ports like Florida, where we have multiple ports in Tampa, Fort Lauderdale, Miami, and in Jacksonville that are open and others that are ready to go.”
“A lot of this that is happening in California is the state of California’s fault,” he added. “Their laws basically say if you’re an independent trucker, most truckers are independent. You can’t work in California. You have to be an employee of a company. Why would an independent trucker that lives in Texas become an employee of a company in California and then pay the exorbitant income taxes in California for every day they work shipping in California? They have decided, ‘Look, I’m not putting up with that hassle.'”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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