GOP presidential candidate former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum weighed in on how important it is as a United States senator to make important votes, even while campaigning for another position, saying it’s “an obligation.”
“I think voting is important and that’s what you do as a senator and to say your going to fight [for] an issue, then it would probably be a good idea to be on the floor and make the argument,” Santorum said during a sit down interview Tuesday afternoon, without naming any names of fellow GOP presidential candidates who currently hold a senate seat.
Breitbart News recently reported GOP presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) has missed the most votes out of all senators currently running for president on both the GOP and Democrat side. He also missed a vote on defunding Planned Parenthood – an issue his campaign had been very vocal about since Rubio is pro-life.
As the Des Moines Register previously reported:
A secret-money group that supports Marco Rubio for president dropped a mailer in Iowa this week that says he ‘will defund Planned Parenthood.’”
But Rubio skipped two opportunities this week to weigh in on the uproar over the abortion provider, U.S. Senate records show.
Following the Planned Parenthood missed vote, Rubio also missed a vote on defense spending.
“If someone’s running for president, your obviously going to miss some votes because of the unpredictability of senate votes,” Santorum explained, adding that the question is whether or not that senator is making the votes that are important.
He recalled when he was running for the Senate, he had held a House seat. “I was a House member and …we made like 92 or 93 percent of the votes, and I can tell you it was hard.”
“I have an obligation to do the job I have well,” he said, remembering his thought process during that time. “I would make the argument that you have an obligation,” Santorum said, of making critical votes when you are in the senate.
He explained that being a member of the senate provides a platform – the Senate floor – to express oneself on crucial issues and to “highlight these issues and bring national attention to what is [happening] on the Senate floor.”
“If you’re really driven by the issue, then you need to be there and fight for those issues,” Santorum added.
Santorum also said it is important for voters to analyze Senate voting records.
“Ted Cruz offered an amendment that increased H1B [visas] by 500 percent,” Santorum explained, referencing the debate in 2013 over the Gang of Eight immigration bill.
“There’s one Republican that’s a solid conservative on the issue of immigration – one,” he said, referencing himself, adding that increasing foreign workers under the H1B program as Cruz suggested isn’t in line with conservative beliefs.