Marco Rubio told Fox News that far-left Democrats espousing regret over voting to confirm him as secretary of state is likely just ‘confirmation’ that he is doing a good job.
Democrat Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen told Rubio during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing yesterday that he ‘regret[ted] voting’ to confirm him as secretary of state after indicating as much on ‘Fox News Sunday’ in March. Rubio shot back at the hearing that Van Hollen’s regret just proves he is doing a good job, and he subsequently told Fox News that the same goes for other Democrats who are expressing regret over their nod of approval to him earlier this year when he was confirmed by the Senate 99-0.
‘In some cases, depending on … whoever you’re talking about and what they stand for, the fact that they don’t like what I’m doing is a confirmation I’m doing a good job,’ Rubio said. ‘That’s how I feel about it.’
A growing number of Democrats are coming out against Rubio despite voting to confirm him, with the bulk of the criticism describing him as a sell-out to the Trump administration.
‘I don’t recognize Secretary Rubio,’ Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., added during the Tuesday Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing with Van Hollen, noting that in the past she had viewed him as ‘a bipartisan’ and ‘pragmatic’ person.
‘I’m not even mad anymore about your complicity in this administration’s destruction of U.S. global leadership. I’m simply disappointed,’ Rosen said.
Last week, Democrat Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz lamented that Rubio has aligned himself ‘so closely’ with President Donald Trump.
‘President Trump’s narrow and transactional view of the world is not news to anybody. But what is genuinely surprising to me is that Secretary Rubio is aligning himself so closely with it,’ Schatz said during a live event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations last week.
‘This is someone who, up until four months ago, was an internationalist. Someone who believed in America flexing its powers in all manners, but especially through foreign assistance,’ Schatz continued. ‘And yet, he is now responsible for the evisceration of the whole enterprise. He’s a colleague. I voted for him. We talk all the time. But what I’m trying to understand is: What happened?’
Schatz noted that he hopes to see Rubio ‘reemerge, reassert himself and save the enterprise.’
Rubio’s supportive stance on Trump’s foreign aid cuts, his defense of the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and his alleged lack of action to help get him back to the U.S., his approach to the Russia-Ukraine war, and Rubio’s decision to pull visas from foreign college students in the U.S. for stoking anti-Israel sentiment on university campuses are all issues Democrats have pointed to for why they regret voting to confirm Rubio.
The secretary’s alleged role in bringing white South African refugees to the U.S. was also something for which Rubio was chastised by Democrats during his Tuesday testimony on Capitol Hill.
‘I think a lot of us thought that Marco Rubio was going to stand up to Donald Trump,’ Democrat Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy said in March during an interview on CNN. ‘Marco Rubio has not, and that’s been a great disappointment to many of his former colleagues in the Senate.’