It's hard to take a principled stand when one lacks a spine, as Florida's U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio has shown us since Donald Trump's election — most recently by declaring he's against the creation of a bipartisan commission to look into the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol attacks.
Rubio is not the only Florida Republican who's opposed to looking into what led to this act of domestic terrorism. U.S. Sen. Rick Scott also has announced he will oppose the commission. But that's expected from Scott, a Trump sycophant from Day One who seems most invested in fighting imaginary communists in the Democratic Party than doing anything meaningful for Floridians. Only two Florida Republicans were among the 35 House Republicans who voted in favor of the commission: freshmen Miami U.S. Reps. Maria Elvira Salazar and Carlos Gimenez, for which we commend them.
However, we continue to hold out hope for Rubio, once considered the savior of the Republican Party.
Unlike Scott, Rubio voted to certify the 2020 election results. Essentially, he did his job, but given the low bar congressional Republicans have set on matters dealing with Trump and facts about the elections, that says a lot.
However, as a Republican running for reelection next year, it's in Rubio's best interest to act as if there's nothing to see, nothing to learn about why a mob of Trump supporters who were fed lies about the election violently disrupted a democratic process, with some chanting for the vice president's hanging.
Rubio, Scott and other Republicans claim the FBI and the Justice Department have already investigated the attacks and arrested about 400 people. But the bipartisan commission, which would be made up by five Democrats and five Republicans, would dig deeper into the failures of the country's intelligence and law-enforcement agencies to prevent the attempted insurrection. The commission would also have subpoena power to investigate the factors that influenced the rioters and would be tasked with providing recommendations to prevent future acts of domestic terrorism.
Rubio posted a video on Twitter last week calling the Jan. 6 commission a "partisan joke," a ploy by Democrats to damage the GOP. Partisan politics are, without a question, part of Democrats' motivation, but if Republicans are hurt in next year's elections for mollifying Trump, that's their own doing and well deserved.
Of course, Rubio was livid in 2015 as Republicans investigated, ad nauseam, Hillary Clinton's role in the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, in which four Americans died. Clinton was secretary of State. After House Republicans released their 800-page report, the senator said, "It was a reminder of why those failures should outrage every American, because those failures resulted in the extraordinary sacrifices made by the four brave Americans who lost their lives in the deadly terrorist attacks against U.S. facilities in Libya on the night of Sept. 11, 2012."
Rubio now needs to be outraged on behalf of other "brave Americans" — those law-enforcement officers who were chased, beaten and left without back-up, outnumbered by a raging mob at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
It should be a no-brainer that members of Congress would want to know as much as possible about an event that put their own lives at risk. It was a no-brainer when Congress approved the 9/11 Commission with ample bipartisan support in 2002, but, since then, politics have become rabidly partisan, and the Republican Party has been hijacked by Trump's cult of personality.
It's unlikely Rubio will reverse his stance, but he should — if not for the sake of the nation he professes to love, then to show us just a small shred of backbone he might still possess.
