Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) addressed National Security Agency’s surveillance programs, his proposal to delay Obamacare’s individual mandate until the website is fixed and immigration reform. Senator Rubio claimed that “everyone spies on everybody” and leaders of foreign nations are “responding to domestic pressure.” He also denied that he is trying to derail Obamacare with bill and that Republicans had responsibility for government shutdown. Senator Rubio advocated for a piecemeal approach to immigration reform, saying that “it gets easier to address” pathway to citizenship, “if we deal with some of the other issues first.”
On NSA, Sen. Rubio said, “These leaders are responding to domestic pressures in their own country. None of them are truly shocked about any of this…. Everyone spies on everybody. And that’s just a fact. And whether they want to acknowledge that publicly or not, and every country has different capabilities. But at the end of the day, if you are a U.S. government official, travelling abroad you are aware that anything you have on your cell phone, on your iPad could be monitored by foreign intelligence agencies, including that of your own allies.”
“It’s fundamentally unfair to fine people, to tax people, to send the IRS after people for not buying health insurance, when the website they’re supposed to buy it on, doesn’t work,” Sen. Rubio said. “And that’s all the law says. It says, until that website is working, don’t fine people. I don’t understand how anybody can be against that.”
On immigration reform, Sen. Rubio said, “I also don’t think it’s realistic to believe that the House is just going to take up and pass whatever the Democrats in the Senate are demanding. And I think that there are many things on immigration that we can agree on and I think that we should move on those and make progress on those issues. And there are a handful that we have no consensus on in this country yet, and those issues may have to be delayed at some point until we can reach a consensus on how to approach them.”
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