Name: Marco Rubio: Obama administration won't work with Republicans
Uploaded: 2014-06-30
Duration: 3 min 29 s
Description: Fortune's Tory Newmyer talks with Sen. Rubio about some of his latest pushes in congress.

You've talked about your experience particularly I think in the context of immigration reform, that you learned the political dynamic right now doesn't favor big fixes to complicated problems just legislatively. One of the things you've talked about as part of your anti- poverty plank, is a complete overhaul of the way the Federal government treats poverty programs. You want to establish this flex fund and give authority back to the states to experiment. How do you do that considering what you've said about, what the environment in Washington right now will allow? What I've said is the environment is not conducive to comprehensive reforms of difficult issues like tax reform. You know, overhaul the entire tax code, which applies to every aspect of American life. Our anti- poverty programs are our safety- net programs already in place, and what we're arguing is not to overhaul them, in the sense that we wanna get rid of 'em. What we're talking about is how you would fix them. Now whether you do that through a series of bills or one major piece of legislation is, is obviously a hurdle that we'll have to overcome. But what's very clear is that the, that the safety net programs we have now are incomplete. Because while they may alleviate some of the pain of poverty, they don't cure poverty and we wanna cure it. We don't just want to deal with the pain of it, which is important ,. But we also wanna cure it so people who now are living trapped in poverty, can emerge from it and never have to depend on government again. You've also talked about, the unwillingness of the Obama administration to work with Republicans. I'm curious where recently you've tried. And I'll give you a perfect example. A few weeks ago, I have a well professed interest in student loan debt because I had some myself, a significant amount, that I had even when I swore into the Senate. I had significant student loan debt, and I've talked about that for years. I've actually have a number of proposals to address it. From income based repayment legislation all the way to creating alternatives to student loan debt, and everything in between. Like set, fixing the accreditation model so we can have alternatives to higher education so college would cost less. Not once have we seen any good faith effort to work together on that, on the contrary what you saw was a political effort a week ago to bring to the Senate floor a, a bill by senator Warren that would lower the monthly payments on student loans by a nominal amount, but would do nothing to make college mor affordable, or to provide more alternatives to student loans for students and that's just one example. The same is true with the earn income tax credit issue that i've discussed. Again the president brought it up in the state of the union, actually cited me by name, as someone who had proposed changes to the way that program works. But there's been no followup in regards to working together, and instead, you know, we see the rhetoric about how those who don't agree with their approach. Just don't care. No, just curious. Practically, how does this work? I mean, do you call the ledge affairs office and not get your calls [ UNKNOWN ]. Well, for the first couple years we were here, we didn't even know who our ledge affairs person was. For the first couple years that I was in the Senate, we didn't even know who it was in the White House. I mean, we knew the name, but we hadn't even interacted with them. It's improved somewhat over the last few years, but I would just venture to guess that if you're a chief executive of the country. Legitimately interested in solving the problems. And you see someone from the other side of the aisle, who expresses an interest in a topic you're talking about, and has ideas that are legitimate and credible. It would range from the president actually calling, me, or someone like it, although he doesn't have to, all the way to getting regular visits from their staff about how we can work together and try to come up with solutions. Instead what we get here are messaging efforts by the senate democrats but to, to bring issues to a vote on the floor, so come election time they can say, republicans are in favor of more loans or republicans are against students finding more affordable options.

Fortune's Tory Newmyer talks with Sen. Rubio about some of his latest pushes in congress.