And Florida is stuck with him for at least five more years. Here's a recap of the stupidest shit we had to put up with from Lil' Marco all year.
1. Saying the 23 million people he wanted to rip health coverage from were just a "small percentage" of the U.S. population, so who cares if they die, right?
Give Marco Rubio this: His mathematics are sound. The U.S. population is about 321 million people, which means the 23 million human beings set to lose access to basic health insurance under the GOP's Obamacare repeal plan are, indeed, only about 7 percent of all Americans.
So — in terms of pure numbers — Rubio was right on when he defended the Republican plan by noting that just "a small percentage of the overall population" would be affected by his party's mad rush to dismantle Obama's health-care plan.
2. Cosponsoring a deeply unconstitutional bill that would make it a felony to boycott Israeli companies:
Good news! We've finally found a bipartisan issue that has united Democrats and Republicans across the state of Florida! Republican Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen have signed on to support a bill alongside Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson and Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Ted Deutch, Alcee Hastings, Frederica Wilson, and other Florida Democrats.
Unfortunately, they've all rallied around violating the First Amendment by making it a felony for people or companies to support a United Nations-led call to boycott certain businesses within the state of Israel. People caught supporting similar Israeli boycotts could face anywhere from a $250,000 fine to 20 years in jail. The bill was reportedly drafted by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), one of the most powerful lobbying groups in Washington.
The American Civil Liberties Union is now begging Congress not to pass the law by explaining that Americans have a basic First Amendment right to criticize Israel.
3. Cheerleading Donald Trump's decision to fire rockets at Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and nearly starting a world war:
There are plenty of world leaders who could make a legitimate, morally righteous case that airstrikes on Syria were the appropriate response to Bashar al-Assad's cowardly gas attack on defenseless children. But Donald Trump and Marco Rubio are not those leaders.
Trump has spent the last year libeling the same Syrian refugees killed in this week's sarin gas attack. He literally banned the children murdered in that attack from finding safe refuge in the United States. And Marco Rubio — who would have politically lost nothing by standing up to Trump — repeatedly refused to condemn his bigoted refugee ban.
So it's more than a little disturbing that since last night Rubio, has been the Don's single best spokesman on cable news and the internet over his Syrian missile strikes.
The Don's change of heart came, Rubio insists, because the president was hit hard by the images of children killed by Assad's chemical weapons (and certainly not, as some cynics have suggested, due to Trump's desperate need for a polling bounce via mouth-breathing cable news anchors gushing over the "beauty" of his missiles.)
"I know @POTUS was deeply moved by the images and stories emerging from #SyriaChemicalAttack," Rubio tweeted last night shortly after the bombing run was announced.
That's some truly blinding hypocrisy. Trump is now moved by the deaths of the same kids he has gone to the mat to keep out of safety, propped up by a senator who could have been his loudest critic but did nothing.
4. Accepting $100,000 from Betsy DeVos' family and then conveniently voting to confirm her nomination as education secretary:
Remember over the summer when Marco Rubio waxed eloquent about how he and his fellow U.S. senators would be a strong "check and balance" on Donald Trump? Hahahaha! That was a funny one, Marco.(Bonus: Rubio voted to confirm Rex Tillerson too.)
Rubio now has a sterling 100 percent voting record backing all of President Trump's nominees and plans, according to FiveThirtyEight's Trump tracker. He did his latest solid for the Don today by voting to confirm Betsy DeVos as secretary of education over protests from basically every public school teacher in the nation.
But Rubio's help in DeVos' razor-thin approval is especially unsurprising. It turns out DeVos — a multibillionaire with zero educational experience — and her family have been especially generous donors to Rubio's campaign coffers. In fact, Rubio accepted more DeVos cash than any other senator who backed her nomination today.
Rubio has taken a total of $98,300 from DeVos and her family members, according to Federal Election Commission reports crunched by the Center for American Progress (CAP).
5. Taking $156,000 from telecom companies and then
When a congressional issue unites the following list of subhuman rat-people, you know it's going to be something awful. One bill this year has brought together U.S. Sens. Tom Cotton (the dude who hates Iran), Jim Inhofe (the idiot who took a snowball inside the Capitol to disprove global warming), Rand Paul, Orrin Hatch, Mitch McConnell,the Zodiac KillerTed Cruz, and Miami's own Marco Rubio.
Does the measure compel Donald Trump to release his tax returns? Demand that U.S. intelligence agencies declassify their investigation into Trump's alleged ties to Russia? Nope.
The bill simply lets internet service providers sell your web-browsing history to whomever they want.
6. Being too much of a weasel to speak up and say anything about Trump's Muslim ban:
Marco Rubio is less a U.S. senator than a wide-eyed college freshman, lost in the gleaming halls of his institution, deeply curious but frankly very confused and a little frightened by his ignorance.
Sure, the people of Florida elected him based on his promise to serve as a brake on Donald Trump's wildest plans, but now that he's back in the Senate, it's becoming clear he's not there to make bold pronouncements or to vote against any of Trump's plans. He's on a journey of discovery, man, just trying to get a deeper understanding of the universe.
Take, for instance, Trump's executive order banning people from seven majority-Muslim countries, a move that sparked widespread chaos and outrage around the globe over the weekend. The order was many things: abhorrent, anti-American, unconstitutional. But it certainly was not confusing.
The religious motivation was so clear that a federal judge quickly put an emergency stay on it. It was so clear that conservative senators such as John McCain and Lindsey Graham joined a half-dozen other GOP senators in condemning it. It was so clear that tens of thousands of protesters joined pro bono attorneys at airports around the nation to fight it all weekend.
But poor Marco Rubio finds himself too confused to take a stand. After a weekend of outrage and chaos, Rubio finally weighed in on the order late last night on Facebook by essentially declining to say whether he thinks it's OK to religiously discriminate against travelers coming to the United States. He admits he's "uneasy" about the plan but needs more information before he can risk having an actual opinion about it.
7. Casually admitting he plans to cut Medicare and social security after first lowering taxes for millionaires:
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a hall-of-fame-level cretin, plans to vote on a tax bill that will redistribute billions of dollars from the poor to the rich, exacerbate the nation's terrifying problems with income inequality, and force more poor Americans into bankruptcy while cutting taxes for major corporations and conglomerates. Because Rubio is a monster, he also hinted earlier this week that he and his party aren't even done cutting benefits. In a speech two days ago, Rubio admitted that, once this tax abomination gets passed, the GOP plans to take a sledgehammer to social security and Medicare.
Rubio warned this week that, to prevent the deficit from exploding due to his own stupid tax-cut plan, his party knows some spending reductions will be necessary. "That will mean instituting structural changes to social security and Medicare for the future," Rubio said.
8. Literally running away from anyone who tried to question him about any of his dreadful decisions:
