Moderator pushes Rubio to answer question on 2022 election results
Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.), who will take over the helm of the House Judiciary Committee in the new Congress, on Tuesday asked Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) about his views on the future of the 2020 presidential election system.
I’m glad that @RubioFeels asks @marcorubio about his views on the 2020 election system. He’s the next chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. — Max Boot (@MaxBoot) January 17, 2017
Rubio is a key player in the debate over how to fix the problems of the 2018 mid-term election results, when Democrats retained control of the House and Senate. After that defeat, Republicans took over the House, with the president’s party in the majority, and they are looking to enact legislation that would restore many of the voting rights that were stripped from millions of voters by the states that went for Donald Trump.
Rubio has said that if Congress doesn’t pass the legislation, there will be “an attempted coup.” He has called for a constitutional amendment to change what would amount to the “most basic of all rights, the right to vote.” But while Rubio has previously expressed concern about the consequences of the 2018 defeat, he hasn’t offered a full, detailed explanation of how to avoid a replay in the future.
Rubio has also declined to offer any more concrete answers so far about how to fix the problem that has played out in the past half decade. In his last debate, he dodged a question about why the number of voters who cast ballots for his party in the midterms was lower than it should have been. His campaign has never said precisely how the system works, and, at the moment, he has kept the issue of elections in political parties to a one-issue focus: voter confidence.
Curbelo pushed Rubio on that issue Tuesday, suggesting that he should be able to answer why the Florida senator’s party suffered a 20-point drop in its share of the vote.
“Mr. Rubio, the question is, since you were elected to this seat in the Senate, what have you done to fix the problem of voter confidence?” Curbelo, a retired judge, said