https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marco_RubioWill the real Marco Rubio please stand up? Standard issue Business as usual insider or "Tea Party Conservtive"?
From Rubio bio
In late 1999, a special election was called to fill the seat for the 111th House District in the Florida House of Representatives, representing Miami. The seat had been held by Representative Carlos Valdes, who had run for and won an open Florida State Senate seat.[20] It was considered a safe Republican seat, so Rubio's main challenge was to win the GOP nomination.[18] He campaigned as a moderate, advocating tax cuts and early-childhood education.[18]
ccording to National Journal, during this period Rubio did not entirely adhere to doctrinaire conservative principles, and some colleagues described him as "a centrist who sought out Democrats and groups that don’t typically align with the GOP".[18] He co-sponsored legislation that would have let farm workers sue growers in state court if they were shortchanged on pay, and co-sponsored a bill for giving in-state tuition rates to the children of undocumented immigrants.[18] In the wake of the September 11 attacks, he voiced suspicion about expanding police detention powers, and helped defeat a GOP bill that would have required colleges to increase reporting to the state about foreign students.[18]
As a state representative, Rubio requested legislative earmarks (called "Community Budget Issue Requests" in Florida), totaling about $145 million for 2001 and 2002, but none thereafter.[31][32] Additionally, an office in the executive branch compiled a longer list of spending requests by legislators, including Rubio,[33] as did the non-profit group Florida TaxWatch.[34] Many of those listed items were for health and social programs that Rubio has described as "the kind of thing that legislators would get attacked on if we didn't fund them."[34] A 2010 report by the Tampa Bay Times/Miami Herald said that some of Rubio’s spending requests dovetailed with his personal interests.[33] For example, Rubio requested a $20 million appropriation for Jackson Memorial Hospital to subsidize care for the poor and uninsured,[34] and Rubio later did work for that hospital as a consultant.[33] A spokesman for Rubio has said that the items in question helped the whole county, that Rubio did not lobby to get them approved, that the hospital money was necessary and non-controversial, and that Rubio is "a limited-government conservative ... not a no-government conservative".[33]
House speaker
On September 13, 2005, at the age of 34,[35] Rubio clinched the speakership after State Representatives Dennis Baxley, Jeff Kottkamp, and Dennis A. Ross dropped out. He was actually sworn in over a year later, in November 2006. He became the first Cuban American to be speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, and would remain speaker until November 2008.[36]
When he was chosen as future speaker in 2005, Rubio delivered a speech to the House in which he asked members to look in their desks, where they each found a hardcover book titled 100 Innovative Ideas For Florida’s Future; but the book was intentionally blank, because it had not yet been written, and Rubio told his colleagues that they would fill in the pages together with the help of ordinary Floridians.[18] In 2006, after traveling around the state and talking with citizens, and compiling their ideas, Rubio published the book.[37][38] The National Journal called this book "the centerpiece of Rubio’s early speakership".[18] About 24 of the "ideas" became law, while another 10 were partially enacted.[38] Among the items from his 2006 book that became law were multiple-year car registrations, a requirement that high schools provide more vocational courses, and an expanded voucher-like school-choice program. Rubio's defenders, and even some critics, point out that nationwide economic difficulties overlapped with much of Rubio's speakership, and so funding new legislative proposals became difficult.[18]
At the time Rubio took office as speaker, Jeb Bush was completing his term as governor, and Bush left office in January 2007. Rubio hired 18 Bush aides, leading capital insiders to say the speaker's suite was "the governor’s office in exile." An article in National Journal described Rubio's style as being very different from Bush's; where Bush was a very assertive manager of affairs in Tallahassee, the article says, Rubio's style was to delegate certain powers, relinquish others, and invite former political rivals into his inner circle.[18] As incoming speaker, he decided to open a private dining room for legislators, which he said would give members more privacy, free from being pursued by lobbyists, though the expense of doing so led to a public relations problem.[18]
In 2006, Florida enacted into law limitations upon the authority of the state government to take private property, in response to the 2005 Supreme Court decision in Kelo v. City of New London which took a broad view of governmental power to take private property under eminent domain. This state legislation had been proposed by a special committee chaired by Rubio prior to his speakership.[39]
Jeb Bush's successor as governor was Charlie Crist, a moderate Republican who took office in January 2007. Rubio and Crist clashed frequently. Their sharpest clash involved the governor's initiative to expand casino gambling in Florida. Rubio sued Crist for bypassing the Florida Legislature in order to make a deal with the Seminole Tribe. The Florida Supreme Court sided with Rubio and blocked the deal.[40][41]
Rubio also was a critic of Crist's efforts to fight climate change through an executive order creating new automobile and utility emissions standards. Rubio accused Crist of imposing "European-style big government mandates," and the legislature under Rubio's leadership weakened the impact of Crist's climate change initiative.[18][41]
Rubio introduced a plan to reduce state property taxes to 2001 levels (and potentially eliminate them altogether), while increasing sales taxes by 1% to 2.5% to fund schools. The proposal would have reduced property taxes in the state by $40–50 billion. His proposal passed the House, but was opposed by Governor Crist and Florida Senate Republicans, who said that the increase in sales tax would disproportionately affect the poor. So, Rubio agreed to smaller changes, and Crist's proposal to double the state's property tax exemption from $25,000 to $50,000 (for a tax reduction estimated by Crist to be $33 billion) ultimately passed.[18][39][42] Legislators called it the largest tax cut in Florida's history up until then.[39][43] At the time, Republican anti-tax activist Grover Norquist described Rubio as "the most pro-taxpayer legislative leader in the country."[42]
As speaker, Rubio "aggressively tried to push Florida to the political right," according to NBC News, and frequently clashed with the Florida Senate, which was run by more moderate Republicans, and with then-Governor Charlie Crist, a centrist Republican at the time.[41] Although a conservative, "behind the scenes many Democrats considered Rubio someone with whom they could work," according to biographer Manuel Roig-Franzia.[44] Dan Gelber of Miami, the House Democratic leader at the time of Rubio's speakership, considered him "a true conservative" but not "a reflexive partisan," saying: "He didn't have an objection to working with the other side simply because they were the other side. To put it bluntly, he wasn't a jerk."[45] Gelber considered Rubio "a severe conservative, really far to the right, but probably the most talented spokesman the severe right could ever hope for."[41]
While Speaker of the Florida House, Rubio shared a residence with another Florida State Representative, David Rivera, which the two co-owned in Tallahassee. The house went into foreclosure in June 2010, after five months of missed mortgage payments.[46] At that point, Rubio assumed responsibility for the payments, and the house was sold in June 2015.[47][48]
In 2010 during Rubio's senate campaign, and again in 2015 during his presidential campaign, issues were raised by the media and his political opponents about some items charged by Rubio to his Republican Party of Florida American Express card during his time as House speaker.[49][50][51] Rubio charged about $110,000 during those two years, of which $16,000 was personal expenses unrelated to party business, such as groceries and plane tickets.[52] Rubio said that he personally paid American Express more than $16,000 for these personal expenses.[53][54] In 2012, the Florida Commission on Ethics cleared Rubio of wrongdoing in his use of the party-issued credit card, although the commission inspector said that Rubio exhibited a "level of negligence" in not using his personal MasterCard.[55][56] In November 2015, Rubio released his party credit card statements for January 2005 through October 2006, which showed eight personal charges totaling $7,243.74, all of which he had personally reimbursed, in most instances by the next billing period.[51][52][57] When releasing the charge records, Rubio spokesman Todd Harris said, "These statements are more than 10 years old. And the only people who ask about them today are the liberal media and our political opponents. We are releasing them now because Marco has nothing to hide."[51]
