A.G. Gancarski
Florida’s junior Senator is making the best out of getting passed up to be Donald Trump’s running mate, giving an unsolicited nonsequitur to the Republican Party of Florida (RPOF) at a breakfast meeting.
“I get to stay in Florida too, by the way. That’s awesome,” U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio said at the end of his comments at the RPOF event at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
Indeed, Rubio’s Florida residency seems to have been one major rationale behind Trump’s decision to pass on selecting Rubio.
Trump said earlier this month that one complication to picking Rubio could be the 12th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which blocks electors from voting for a President and Vice President from the same state, a rule that would have presented wrinkles.
“You do that, and it makes it more complicated. There are other people that don’t have that complication,” Trump told Brian Kilmeade. “Now, it’s fairly easily fixed, but you have to do something with delegates, or there has to be a resignation, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So it’s not like picking some people where it’s very easy, where there is none of that.”
The former President’s son made the same point Tuesday during his own remarks to the RPOF.
“He is an incredible guy. We all know him and love him,” Eric Trump said about Rubio. But he added that both Donald Trump and the Senator living in the same state caused “a real problem … a constitutional problem.”
“Were there workarounds for that, you know, send somebody out of state or something? Yeah. I mean, if they’re right, I think you could have gotten around that if you really had to. But that’s a problem having two people from the exact state,” Eric Trump said.
During the veepstakes, Rubio danced around the question of how he would handle getting picked, including the residency qualms, which don’t preclude his getting picked for a Cabinet role such as Secretary of State.
