Marco Rubio

He’s a Republican Senator from a state that was slow to close and is now on the cusp of reopening. This week, on Firing Line. 

RUBIO 4/3 We have to focus on the emergency that’s at hand right now. 

Not yet 50, Marco Rubio is now the senior senator from Florida, a state where young people go for spring break, 

SOT: What is there to do here other than go to the bars and to the beach

and senior citizens go to retire, a tricky combination in the age of Covid-19.

 SOT I think that at my age it would be devastating. 

With questions mounting about whether the country is ready to reopen, 

CUOMO 4/14 We’ve never been here before. No one has gone through this. 

some say enough is enough, the American economy is at stake. 

SOT TRUMP 3/23We’re not going to let the cure be worse than the problem

Senator Rubio is one of the architects of hundreds of billions of dollars of relief to small businesses and their workers.

RUBIO 4/20 The hope here is to keep as many people employed as possible. 

With life turned upside down and concerns about a second wave in the fall.

FAUCI 4/22 we will have coronavirus in the Fall. I am convinced of that 

What does Senator Marco Rubio say now.

‘Firing Line with Margaret Hoover’ is made possible by… Additional funding is provided by… Corporate funding is provided by…

HOOVER: Marco Rubio, welcome to Firing Line. 

RUBIO: Thank you. Thanks for having me. 

HOOVER: You’re the senior United States senator from the state of Florida. You are a former Republican presidential candidate and the chair of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, which has given you a really critical role in the current pandemic. Because Congress is not in session and we are both practicing social distancing you are joining me via Skype from Miami, Florida, and your. 

HOOVER: This week, Congress has passed the second round of funding for PPP, the payroll protection program that added another 321 billion dollars to replenish the relief going to small businesses across the country. And the Senate was at an impasse for days because Democratic lawmakers were holding up negotiations, wanting funding in other areas. Something that you call hostage taking. Now, are you ultimately satisfied with where the deal ended up? 

RUBIO: Yeah. Look, I think when it comes to patient protection, it’s a deal we could have had two weeks ago. There is nothing that they asked for or nothing that came in that bill that we wouldn’t that we didn’t propose ourselves. These things flew off the shelf, that the main need was extraordinary. And eleven days they made 14 years worth of SBA loans. And so we knew we were getting up on that cap and we knew what would happen. The minute that we hit that cap number, they would have to shut it down. They would have to stop taking applications. And there were at least 700,000 applications waiting to be processed when that happened. And so it’s taking this hostage for an entire week, paralyzing the system. All it’s led to is you’ve got hundreds of thousands of small businesses across the country who have filed an application and haven’t haven’t heard back from their lender because their lender can’t can’t do anything about it until that portal at the SBA reopens for approvals. And it should have never, ever happened. 

HOOVER: I want to ask you, that portal the SBA was going to be reopened. But there been and I know, you know, you know, there are 30 million plus small businesses in this country. And there have been study after study, one from the American Enterprise Institute that say, if you’re really going to keep these America’s small businesses open for three months, you need way closer to a trillion or a trillion and a half dollars. So what’s going to keep us from being back here in another week? Once that 320 billion is gone? 

RUBIO:  No, you’re right. I mean, the need is extraordinary. And by the way, I mean, this was expanded to include 501(C)(3)’s. It was expanded to include independent contractors. So it was a massive piece of the bill. And, you know, ultimately, when you go to your colleagues and say, you know, we’re going to do something, we’ve never done it before, it’s a brand new program. They’re not going to give you a trillion dollars to do it. I mean, if we had done it that way, this thing would have been three trillion dollar cares package. So, so we always knew we would have to come back. Everybody always knew we’d have to come back and get more funds. But I don’t think anybody anticipated that it would be 11 days. 

HOOVER: I want to ask you about how the process unfolded from the beginning, there are a couple of challenges, of course, as you mentioned. One of them is that there was no means testing in the first round. And I know you have said that there were companies that were approved that you don’t think should have been approved. President Trump was asked about this in a briefing this week. And let’s take a look at what he said.

QUESTION: Should the criteria be changed so that the money goes to people who need it the most? 

TRUMP: Well, it’s being done by great professionals, it’s being done by banks, and as you know community banks all over the country, they’re… That’s what they do. They loan money and they’re supposed to do it according to not only criteria, but according to what we think is right. But if somebody got something that we think is inappropriate, we’ll get it back. Okay? 

HOOVER: Senator, about 100 publicly traded companies received government money. Some of them with 100 billion dollars of market share, market value. Shake Shack, of course, returned 10 million dollars. Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse, is a chain of 150 locations and over 200 million dollar valuation actually received double the maximum loan from PPP. How are you going to get that money back? 

RUBIO: Well, a couple of points that’s important because I know this, this is worthy of attention. So we should discuss it more clearly. Number one is, we knew at the front end that there would be a temptation for people to apply that may not need this. Companies that had other means of funding it and so forth. And so the debate early on was, well, how do we put in a requirement to prove that you need it? And the initial thought was, you know, make them come forward and provide financials and gross receipts and compare what they’re doing now to what they’re doing a year ago at this time, or a month ago at this time. And then you quickly realize if you, we think it’s complicated now, imagine asking small businesses to show up at a bank and provide financial documentation and audited returns — you know, all these sorts of things, — how difficult it would be. I mean, we wouldn’t have any loans out at this point. And the ones who would be able to get them first without a doubt, are the most sophisticated businesses. And so what Senator Collins came up with and we all agreed and there was in the bill almost from the beginning, this certification. When you get a P.P.P. loan, you certify that because of the current conditions, you need this loan to be able to maintain operations. And so what will happen is one of two things. Number one, there are companies who signed a certification who knew they didn’t need it and they’re gonna have big problems. And then the bigger the loan, the bigger the problem. And then there are other companies that are going to have signed the certification and are going to look back and say, you know, we actually didn’t need it. And at that point in the forgiveness process, it could very well be that it’s not a forgiven loan. Now, look, I think the overwhelming majority of firms in this country, big and small, are going through very difficult times. So I think the overwhelming majority of the applicants that receive PPP are going to have no problem proving that they had a certified need. But there may be a few that got this and had other ways to do it, and they’re going to regret it. So that’s the way it’s going to move forward. But the alternative was to require extensive documents, which, in the view of everyone who was involved would have paralyzed the system. 

HOOVER: I’d like to talk about reopening. Reopening is a conversation that we’re having in this country. We’re having at the federal level, we’re having at the state level. You’ve talked about what you think it’s going to require in order for the country to be safe.

HOOVER: Senator, what do we do to go back to work? 

RUBIO: Well, look, in a moment of crisis on the most important things that people in positions of leadership can be as brutally honest with the public. And here’s brutal honesty about it, because, number one,  no one’s ever done this before. So if anyone tells you they know exactly how to do it, they’re liars because no one’s ever had to do what we’re being asked to do. Not just in the United States, but all over the world. Number two, as long as we don’t have a vaccine, there will, this virus is going to be out there infecting people. And unfortunately, sadly, some people will lose their lives. That’s a terrible thing. The third point is, from a standpoint of just pure science, we just viewed it from a statistical point of view. They’re absolutely right. I mean, we really shouldn’t be out there contacting one another until we have a virus. The problem is there are some out there on television, in other places acting as if that’s a realistic option. And it’s not.  What’s not a realistic option, to argue, or to pretend that what we’re doing now is sustainable for an indefinite period of time. It just isn’t. Even if we wanted to do that, there will come a point in which people will start pushing back on compliance. And then what are you going to do, begin to arrest people because they’re having a birthday party in someone’s yard? I mean that, though, that’s the reality. So what that does is it puts pressure on leaders to do things like what we did this week, and that is provide more funding for not just more testing, new types of testing. And ultimately, we’re going to develop a vaccine. And in the interim, many of the restrictions we now have — It could be masks in the public, it could be six feet apart in line, it could be limitations on how many people can be in an establishment at one given period of time — some of those are going to remain in place and they’ll come at an economic cost. So this is a difficult decision to make. Political leaders are going to be afraid to make it because they know the minute they reopen a little bit and someone dies, they’re gonna get blamed for it. But the reality of it is, we also can’t indefinitely stay in a situation that we’re in right now. So it’s a very difficult balancing act. (up) But the most important thing we have to do is build these capacities to keep our hospitals from being overwhelmed, to try to keep people healthy and hopefully to develop an antiviral that can diminish the impact this disease has. And then maybe get the mortality rate to a very, very low level. Ideally zero until we have a vaccine. 

HOOVER: I mean, I agree with you in your assessment. I guess my one sort of question in terms of your premise is that people are going to be agitating to get out and to not to not listen to the government guidelines. It seems to me the American people have been enormously good sports about it, frankly. So do you really think that people will be agitating so badly to disregard the government’s guidance. 

RUBIO: So I think there’s a difference between being agitated because you’re annoyed and you decide, you know, for ideological reasons or something else, that you don’t want government telling you what to do or because you’re annoyed and you just are stuck, tired of being home. That’s different from going to someone who has now been out of work for six months, who no matter what government tried to do to help them, the business they spent 25 years building has been completely wiped out, and asking them to continue in this situation indefinitely. I mean, there will come a point where the other aspects of this begin to gnaw society. So there, I agree with you. I think the response of the American people has been extraordinary. But I don’t think we can pretend that that is sort of an unlimited reservoir that we can keep tapping forever before you’re going to have some resistance to this. But bottom line is that no matter what assistance government provides, there will be entire industries that are wiped out. And I’m not putting economics above lives. I’m not. I still think that we should be guided primarily by what it will take to save lives and prevent infections. But I wanted to understand the limitations we’re operating under because it’s not like we can continue to do exactly what we’re doing now indefinitely. 

HOOVER: Well, so several states are beginning to implement reopening plans and many of them are in the southeast, in your neck of the woods. Florida actually itself is one of the states that is shut down. Governor DeSantis announced this week the creation of his Reopen Florida Task Force, which is going to issue guidelines by the end of the week about how to reopen. Now, one of the guidances from the White House coronavirus task force for reopening, to governors, is that there’ll be a 14 day declining trajectory in cases. Now, Florida hasn’t reached that yet. So do you think that your state is ready to be reopened? 

RUBIO: Well, if, for example, they follow that guideline — we’ll see what the task force comes up with —  the answer is no. That’s why the rapid testing is so critical. You know, if you’re waiting 10 days to get a result, you’re gonna have inconsistent numbers from day to day. And with regards to it. So, you know, ultimately, I think these are the kinds of difficult decisions that lie ahead. And I’m glad that the governor has put together a task force that involves business, but also involves medical professionals, local leaders who have to enforce some of these things.

HOOVER: Senator, who in the government is responsible for ensuring that we can scale rapid testing in order to be able to do exactly what you suggest? Is it the president? Is it the vice president who is in charge of the White House Coronavirus Task Force? Who’s gonna get the rapid testing delivered to us?

RUBIO: Well, so the the responsibility for having it developed paying for it, ensuring that it exists and is distributed is a federal responsibility. The responsibility to actually deploy it on the ground to the right places and to the right people on the ground, meaning your hospitals, whatever, wherever it is you decide you want to put that, is at the state level. It is the states that ultimately, when they get these tests, will decide where do we want to put them first? But the existence of those tests, the development of it, what’s going to pay for it and drive the demand and create the mandate for their creation, that’s what the federal government plays an indispensable role in that regard.

HOOVER: Governor DeSantis gave some Florida municipalities permission to reopen their beaches this week with some restrictions. And I want you to take a look at some of the images from the open beaches When you when you see these images, what goes through your mind?

RUBIO: Well, what goes through your mind is you’ve got a lot of people out there that want to get out. And the minute you offer an open opportunity for them to go somewhere, they’re going to do it. And those are the sorts of things that you look at and you have to keep in mind when you make these sorts of decisions. I don’t blame the officials in Jacksonville for the decision they made. Ultimately, individuals are you know, we’re a country of free, individual sovereign citizens in the regard that we have to make our own decisions about what we’re going to do and how we’re gonna expose ourselves. Now we have responsibilities to one another. And a lot of people are out there saying, well, we want to go. We want to do whatever we want. We don’t care if we get sick. Well, they may not care if they get sick, but when you wind up at a hospital potentially infecting a nurse or a doctor, they’re going to care. When you wind up going somewhere and interacting with your grandparents or some other member of your family and getting them sick and they wind up in a hospital. Other people are going to care. So there is some element of individual responsibility. I can’t speak to what was on the minds of every single people, every person that went to the beach and congregated. I could tell you the overwhelming majority of people of Duval County did not go to the beach on that day. But those are some big crowds because people are, there’s a lot of pent up demand and frustration. I understand people have been allowed to go anywhere for weeks. 

HOOVER: You know, Georgia Governor Kemp is opening up Georgia. He’s going to open up barber shops, gyms, businesses, tattoo parlors, boiling uh, bowling alleys. Restaurants and movie theaters will be set to reopen by next week. And one of your colleagues from a neighboring state on the other side of Georgia, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, has been tweeting about this. He says, to the point you made earlier, you know, quote, “I worry that our friends and our neighbors in Georgia are going too fast, too soon.” And then in another tweet, he said, quote, “We respect Georgia’s right to determine its own fate, but we are all in this together. What happens in Georgia will impact us in South Carolina.” Do you share Senator Graham’s concern?

RUBIO: To some extent yeah I think you’re absolutely right. So if you think about this for a moment now, you’re I’m probably not going to get in my car until I start looking like the Tiger King. I’m probably not going to get in my car and drive twelve hours to Atlanta, eight hours to Atlanta or even anywhere in Georgia to get my haircut. But if you’re in Jacksonville or if you’re anywhere in north Florida, you’re not that far away. And so I think one of the challenges these states have to think through is that if you’ve reopened, but your neighboring states have not, you’re going to have people from the neighboring states coming into your state and frequenting these facilities and creating even bigger crowds for you. Likewise, you could have people from your state that hasn’t reopened, go get infected, come back and bring it to your hospitals and to your community. They go back it goes back to the point I made originally in this. No one can tell you the perfect way to do this because no one’s ever done this before. There is no manual for this. And embedded in this is our system of federalism, right. Where states and governors have a tremendous amount of power. And that generally serves us very well, including in this crisis, for that matter. 

HOOVER: Is there a role, does Congress have a role to play in terms of setting national standards for returning.

RUBIO: I think this works best. My view, the way it works best is experts in epidemiology and public health provide us with information and they help policymakers set standards like what the White House has done. But ultimately, those standards are implemented and enforced by local officials. 

HOOVER: We get to this split in powers that our constitution has delegated between states and the federal government. And of course, the commerce clause gives the federal government power to regulate interstate commerce. On the other hand, the 10th Amendment gives states the vast powers with police and public health. And some of this adds some chaos to the COVID crisis, but this week that Attorney General William Barr said that if governors, quote, “impinge on either civil rights or the national commerce, then we’ll have to address that.” Take a listen to what William Barr, Attorney General Barr, just said.

WILLIAM BARR (AUDIO): These are unprecedented burdens on civil liberties right now. You know, the idea that you have to stay in your house is disturbingly close to house arrest. I’m not saying it wasn’t justified. I’m just saying in some places it might still be. I’m not saying in some places it might still be justified, but it’s very onerous, as is shutting down your livelihood. To me, this is a little bit like, you know, fighting a cancer. You can’t just keep feeding the patient chemotherapy and say, well, we’re killing the cancer because we’re getting to the point where we’re also killing the patient.

HOOVER: How do we deal with these unprecedented burdens on civil liberties, as the attorney general puts it? And do you view them, do you agree with him that these are unprecedented burdens on our civil liberties?

RUBIO: Well, there’s no doubt that they’re unprecedented burdens. The question is whether they’re justified. Look, one of the examples I’ve used is eminent domain, right? The governments at every level have the power to take your private property away because there’s a- They can come in and say, we need your house, we need it to build a road and they can take it from you. Now, they have to pay you. They have to compensate you for it. We are taking people’s freedoms away and livelihoods. We are denying them basic rights. We’re doing it in the public interest. And to a certain point, government can help compensate you for it, but not fully and not entirely. The second point that I would make is, it ties back to what I said a little while ago, and that is you are telling people that they can’t do certain things. And the American people have responded, in my view, phenomenally. But how long can you ask it, is the question? And if you think that it’s forever, you’re wrong. And ultimately, as in any crisis situation, you know, there are going to be flaws, mistakes made, the things that fall through the cracks. But that’s the nature of crisis. That’s why it’s a crisis. It is asking you to deal with something faster and bigger than you’ve traditionally been dealing with. 

HOOVER: You’ve talked about the importance of contact tracing, which is by the CDC’s definition: trace and monitor contacts of infected people and notify them of their exposure. In Westport, Connecticut the police department is actually now testing out pandemic drones. All right. They can fly around and monitor people’s temperatures from 190 feet away. They can detect sneezing, coughing, heart rate and breathing rates.

HOOVER: What do you think of that? 

RUBIO: I think it’s something from a movie, right? I mean, this is something you would see in a movie 20 years ago and you would say that’s never going to happen. And so, in times of crisis, in times of fear, there’s always this extraordinary tension between personal liberties and the safety or national security of a society or of a country. We saw that in the Second World War. We saw mistakes were made. We saw it in the civil war. We see it in times of conflict. And I think this is one of those times where there is going to be the technological capability to do things like, you know, track people’s cell phones and see where have you been? I think that, you know, I don’t have a perfect answer for how to manage those things, but just one more example of the kinds of things that people will push back on. A lot of people who have been infected will be more than happy to tell you everywhere they went and everyone they came in contact with. And some people are going to tell you, it’s none of your business. And and in a free society, those are the sorts of challenges that you’re going to face. 

HOOVER: You have in the last two years in the Senate focused on China. And in 19, in February of last year, February of 2019, you issued a report called Made in China 2025 long before COVID emerged where you were concerned about supply chains. And you wrote, quote, “The US runs the risk of losing important components of its medical supply chain to China’s government backed industry. Could you have, knowing that, predicted the shortages that we’d have through this pandemic? 

RUBIO: Well, I couldn’t have predicted the pandemic. What I’ve been saying for a long time is when a nation becomes that dependent on other countries for its means of production, you are now incredibly vulnerable. You are incredibly vulnerable if something bad happens in that country that cuts you off, like a pandemic. But you’re also incredibly vulnerable in a moment of conflict being used against you as leverage. To a country sitting back and saying, well, really, we’re going to move on Taiwan and if you do something about it we’re gonna cut off your medicines or your rare earth minerals. That’s a real vulnerability. Look, I’m a huge believer in capitalism. It is by far the best economic model in the world. And one of the things that makes it the best is it always allocates to the most, it always results in the most efficient allocation of capital. Always. It will always move the means of production to where it’s most efficient. And that’s generally a fantastic result. But every now and then, the most efficient outcome is not in our national interest. 

HOOVER: Yes

RUBIO: And you’re seeing some of that now. It is probably much more efficient to make personal protective equipment and nasal swabs for testing and the components necessary for ventilators in another country, in China as an example. But it certainly hasn’t been in our national interest that that’s the case. And we’ve had to shut down our entire economy to compensate for it. So whatever money we may have saved by making those things over there, we have far exceeded that in what we have spent to make up for it now in hindsight. So there, a nation has to have industrial capacity in order to truly be safe. 

HOOVER: Now, that doesn’t mean the U.S. government opens factories and owns the means of production, but to the extent that in our laws, whether it’s taxation, regulation or other things-

HOOVER: Tariffs?

RUBIO: Well, you know, tariffs are a tool that I generally prefer us not having to use. I think there are ways that you can create industries in this country without using tariffs. We may have to in the case of if you’re in a conflict with another country like we are with the Chinese, where they’re blocking our companies access to their markets, then I think the only tool we have is to do the same in return, especially if it’s a critical industry. 

HOOVER: In this week’s New York Times, Chinese agents helped spread the fake text message and social media posts that said Trump was locking down the country. It’s also been reported that China has tried to spread rumors that the virus itself was created in American army medical laboratories. From your position on the Senate Intelligence Committee, tell me you guys are looking at this. 

RUBIO: Absolutely. And one of the things that I will tell you and one of the arguments that I’ve made is that in the 21st century, common defense, whether it’s through NATO or our alliances in Asia or even anywhere in the world, it’s no longer just about missiles, tanks, airplanes. A lot of it is informational warfare, electronic warfare, cyber space. All of these things work together. China has two goals. Number one is to portray itself to its own people as better than the US and the rest of the world. That’s number one. And they have a pretty free rein on that because they control all the media and they control the messaging and dissident voices there are quickly silenced or disappear. But the second is to portray themselves globally to other countries as having handled this better. The fundamental argument they make to the world is the US is a great power in rapid decline, and they are a great power in rapid ascent. And they want to use this crisis as evidence of how they handled it versus us. And what they do is, they cover up their mistakes at home and they highlight or make them up here at home. And and luckily, much of the world has seen through it and it’s backfired. But it nonetheless should indicate to us exactly what they’re up to. And sadly, there are some elements in our society that have played along wittingly or unwittingly  on some of these narratives.

HOOVER: One last question. CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield has told The Washington Post, quote, “There is a possibility that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through.” Are you concerned? Is there any calculation where you think through sort of the consequences of opening up the economy and then needing to return to our homes and social distancing if we don’t have a vaccine and therapeutics by then?

RUBIO: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you think about one of the things that I always talk about is and I’ve said often is that, you know, there were mistakes made and the whole world has made them. I mean, there isn’t a newspaper, there isn’t a free nation on this planet in which newspapers and the media are not criticizing their leaders for their response to the crisis. Every single one. If you read the press and see the press in Europe, they are livid at every one of their leaders as well. And you’ve seen the same reaction in other parts of the world. But the one thing we can control or try to influence is the future. And we can’t change the mistakes that were made in the past. We can certainly learn from them and not repeat them. But there is no excuse for allowing there to be a second wave, which again goes back to doing the things now that we didn’t do. Then the ability to rapidly test, the ability to rapidly to socially distance and to have the capacity so our hospitals are not overwhelmed. I am very concerned that we could be impacted by a second wave and maybe we won’t be and that’ll be great, but we have to be prepared for that possibility, take warnings like that seriously, and build up the capacity we didn’t have in March that caused us to get into the situation we’re in now. 

HOOVER: Senator Rubio, thank you very much for your leadership during this time. For fighting for small businesses and for representing us in the Senate. I appreciate your time today and keep fighting the good fight. 

RUBIO: Thank you, thanks for having me.

HOOVER: Stay healthy.

RUBIO: You too, thank you. 

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