Mitch Perry
If Marco Rubio and his staffers in Tampa and Miami decide to hit the beach this holiday weekend, they’ll be well stocked in footwear.
Activists in both cities descended upon the Florida senator’s district offices today to deliver a boxful of flip-flop sandals to his office, an obvious reference to his decision last week to run for re-election to the U.S. Senate, after telling everyone for over a year he was done with that institution.
“We just wanted to highlight these issues that he’s reversed his positions on,” said Melissa Meehan Baldwin with For Our Future, a liberal super PAC. “There’s a lot of issues that we care a lot about: immigration reform, (the) Puerto Rican debt crises, climate change, and we really want a senator who’s here to represent the people, not focused on his political campaign. And we feel that when he flip-flops on those issues, that he’s doing so for his political career, versus doing the things that are really what Florida citizens need. “
Receiving the box of beach footwear was Ashley Cook, Gulf Coast regional director for Rubio, who said that the office would donate them to New Beginnings, an organization that helps the homeless in Tampa.
“So we thank you for bringing them by and glad we’re able do some good with them,” she told the handful of activists, who were joined by about five members of the media at the senator’s offices in the Westshore District.
Returning to run again for the Senate is not the first time Rubio has been accused of flip-flopping. Most notably has been the issue of immigration reform, something Ana Lamb, the president of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) Council 7250, reminded Cook of on Friday.
Rubio was part of a group of GOP senators who supported legislation in favor of comprehensive immigration reform in 2013, but later turned against the proposal.
Lamb said she and others in the Latino advocacy community never bought into how sincere Rubio was in the first place as a member of the “Gang of Eight” senators of both parties who put together the proposal, which was approved in the Senate but never came up for a vote in the House of Representatives.
“We tried to talk to him in Washington, but he never wanted to say anything other than to the media that he was supporting that bill, ” she recounts about LULAC’s lack of access to him in 2013. “He wasn’t listening to us … there were groups like ours trying to talk to him and we couldn’t. It seemed he was caught in the middle.”
Other activists who attended the march to Rubio’s office also said they were extremely disappointed in his support of the Republican party’s standard bearer, Donald Trump.
Rubio told CNN’s Jake Tapper in May that while he didn’t back away from his criticisms of Trump during the campaign — including calling him a “con man” and saying he shouldn’t be given access to nuclear codes — but added he would not become his “chief critic,” saying that “he deserves the opportunity to go forward and make his argument and try to win.” He has not formally endorsed Trump, however.
