The Adult In The Room: Rubio Owns The Senate

Some stupid people in the Senate decided to make a spectacle of themselves yesterday when they hosted Secretary of State Marco Rubio to give testimony about Venezuela before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Secretary Rubio is very, very good at his job. And so many of these senators are not.

One of the amazing things about American politics is how many Americans believe there are true conspiracies operating at a high level in American politics. All you have to do is meet our senators and members of Congress in order to know how dumb this is.

Politics is significantly more like “Veep” than it is like “House of Cards.”

Illinois Democrat senator Tammy Duckworth — not one of the sharper tools in the drawer — had a spat with Rubio on whether war needed to be declared in order to perform strikes on drug boats in the Caribbean.

“These non-state actors, who possess state-like capabilities in terms of their weaponry, pose a grave danger to the United States,” Rubio stated. “I don’t think any American would dispute that we have cartels that pose a threat to the United States.”

“You’re saying that he (President Trump) can invoke this wartime power?” she queried, adding that the wartime power had only been invoked three times: the War of 1812, World War I, and World War II.

“I’m here to discuss foreign policy and what’s in the realm of the Department of State,” Rubio replied. “I think your question would be better directed at the Department of Justice. … You’re asking me a question about the domestic application of a law that’s best directed to the Department of Justice.”

“It’s not a complication,” she said, somehow confusing words.

“I can tell you that the United States is most certainly confronting terrorist and criminal organizations operating in our hemisphere that pose a grave danger to the United States. Anyone who believes that gangs that flood our country with fentanyl or cocaine are not threats to the United States, is not living in reality, and certainly does not reflect the opinion of most Americans,” he fired back.

Owned.

Then there was Senator Chris Van Hollen, who is just a mockery. Every time you see him, you think to yourself,  “It’s not possible for him to become more of a cucumber with eyeballs.” And yet there he is, becoming more of a cucumber with eyeballs, straight from the garden.

Van Hollen suggested it was oil executives pushing the change in Venezuela, saying, “ Mr. Secretary, simple yes or no question: Were you with President Trump during any of those conversations he had with people with oil interests in Venezuela about the possibility of deposing Maduro?”

“That’s not a simple yes or no question, but I can answer quickly,” Rubio responded. “And that is the president always elicits opinions from all sorts of people, including, for example, Chevron has an active license in Venezuela. They operate in Venezuela. They’ve been doing so even when the sanctions were in place. So of course you would ask Chevron, “What is your opinion of Delcey Rodriguez?” “What is your opinion of their economy and of their prospects?” But the notion that somehow the president authorized this challenge at the urging of oil executives is absurd. That never happened.”

“Mr. Secretary, I’m asking whether you were with the president?” Van Hollen persisted.

“That never happened. I couldn’t be with him because it never happened,” Rubio fired back. “The oil executives were not involved whatsoever in any of the planning on this matter.”

Owned.

By the way, Senator Chris Van Hollen, if you’re going to ask a question you don’t already know the answer to, you’re doing it wrong. (That is the first rule of lawyering: Don’t ask questions for which you don’t already know the answer.)

Rubio went on to make clear that criminal organizations are endemic to the Caribbean, Central America, and South America, saying:

We have a real reality in our region of these trans-national criminal terrorist organizations — that in many cases possess weapons that you ascribe to a nation state, not to a gang — who pose a grave threat to the national security of the United States, but also to the stability of the region. If you walk through the region, what is the primary threat in Colombia? Transnational criminal organizations. What is the threat to Mexico? What is the threat to the Caribbean basin? 

These groups have to be confronted. They have to be confronted forcefully. What’s the threat in Haiti? The systemic collapse. And that is these criminal gangs that basically control territory and threaten the ability to even form a government there in that regard. So it’s endemic throughout the region, and it ultimately impacts the United States through mass migration, through drug trafficking and other related criminal organizations. And so we need to have a force posture that can confront that.  

Senator Rand Paul, on the Republican side of the aisle, targeted Rubio over the Venezuela operation, calling it unconstitutional. “If a foreign country bombed our air defense missiles, captured and removed our president and blockaded our country, would that be considered an act of war?” he asked. 

“I will acknowledge you’ve been very consistent on all these points the entire career, no matter who’s in charge. I will point to two things. The first is it’s hard for us to conceive that an operation that lasted about 4.5 hours and was a law enforcement operation to capture someone we don’t recognize as a head of state, indicted in the United States, or wanted with a $50 million bounty —” Rubio began.  

“If it only took four hours to take our president, very short, nobody dies on the other side. Nobody dies on our side. It’s perfect. Would it be an act of war?” Paul asked. 

“We just don’t believe that this operation comes anywhere close to the constitutional definition of a war,” Rubio asserted. 

“But would it be an act of war if someone did it to us? Nobody dies. Few casualties. They’re in and out. Boom. It’s a perfect military operation. Would that be an act of war? Of course, it would be an act of war. I’m probably the most anti-war person in the Senate, and I would vote to declare war if someone invaded our country and took our president. So I think we need to at least acknowledge this is a one-way argument, one-way arguments that don’t rebound, that you can’t apply to yourselves, that cannot be universally applicable, are bad arguments,” Paul contended. 

Here’s why Senator Paul’s argument is bad: Who cares whether Venezuela considers it an act of war? The question is whether, constitutionally, you require a declaration of war in order to do this thing. Is it a war for the United States to perform a law enforcement grab-and-snatch of a person we do not recognize as the legitimate, rightful leader of a country? Do we need to declare war in America?  

Who cares what Venezuelans think about it? I don’t care what Nigerians think about. I don’t care what Israelis think about it. I don’t care what anybody thinks about it. We’re Americans; the American Constitution applies.  

The question that ought to be asked is not whether we would consider it an act of war if somebody did it to us; if we did, we would then have to wait and go through the constitutional mechanisms of declaring war. That’s what the question is about. It is not whether what we just did to Venezuela is an adversarial action. Of course it’s an adversarial action. The question is, constitutionally speaking, do you have to declare war in order to do this thing? Not whether in some random Platonic universe this is considered a definitional “act of war.”

That’s the point Rubio was making: Make the case that the operation constitutes a war under the definition of war in the Constitution, as opposed to a policing action or a law enforcement action.

It’s a cheap rhetorical trick that Senator Paul used there.

Rubio was asked about Cuba and said the Trump administration would not involve itself in an active regime change in Cuba. They would, of course, love to see the regime fall.

Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz asked, “Will you make a public commitment today to rule out U.S. regime change in Cuba?”

“Regime change?” Rubio answered. “Oh, no. I think we would love to see the regime change. That doesn’t mean that we’re going to make a change, but we would love to see a change. There’s no doubt about the fact that it would be of great benefit to the United States if Cuba was no longer governed by an autocratic regime.” 

“But you know what we mean by regime change,” Schatz persisted.  “We don’t mean I wish someone else were in charge. When we talk about regime change, we’re talking about using the power of the United States, usually kinetic power, but often other kinds of coercion. I’m not even saying that that’s always not in our interests; I’m just saying, I’m not asking you whether we would prefer a different kind of government. I’m asking whether you are trying to precipitate the fall of the current regime.”

“Yeah, but that’s statutory. The Helms-Burton Act, the U.S. embargo on Cuba, is codified. It was codified in law, and it requires regime change in order for us to lift the embargo,” Rubio pointed out.

Owned.

Senator Tim Kaine, the long-forgotten vice presidential candidate for Hillary Clinton, went after Rubio because Donald Trump supposedly said Iceland and not Greenland in his Davos speech. “We’re not mad at Iceland. They haven’t cost us any money. The president just mistook the two countries for each other, correct?” Kaine said.

Rubio then gave a deathless, hilarious reply, with a wink at the recent past: “Yeah, he meant to say Greenland. But I think we’re all familiar with the presidents who have verbal stumbles. We’ve had presidents like that before, some made a lot more than this one.”

Owned.

Rubio was also asked about Iran and again pointed out that the people of Iran deserve better than the current leadership:

And the core problem they face, unlike the protests you saw in the past on some other topics, is that they don’t have a way to address the core complaints of the protesters, which is that their economy’s in collapse. And the reason why there’s economies and collapse is because they spend all their money and all their resources building weapons and sponsoring terrorist groups around the world, instead of reinvesting it back into their society and as a result, have taken on massive global sanctions, which has isolated their economy and their country.

And so that’s what the Iranian people are demanding, is that they stop doing that and start caring about them and get these sanctions off of them, and this regime is unwilling to do it. So the core challenges, the protests may have ebbed, but they will spark up again in the future because this regime, unless they are willing to change and or leave, has no way of addressing the legitimate and consistent complaints of the people of Iran who deserve better. 

Has there ever been a better Secretary of State?