Inducing government shutdowns is not an effective tactic when it comes to negotiating in Washington, Florida GOP Sen. Marco Rubio said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“I don’t think shutdowns are good leverage,” Rubio said in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper. “It’s a lesson I’ve certainly learned in my time here.”
Rubio said people should “separate the tactics from the goal and the policy aim,” and offered an optimistic assessment about the possibility that the Trump administration and Congress could address both border security and immigration.
“I hope, tactics aside, we can all agree that border security is important for America,” Rubio said. “And it creates opportunity to do more on these other issues.”
Rubio’s comments followed the end of the longest government shutdown in US history, an impasse that lasted for more than a month and led to hundreds of thousands of government employees missing two paychecks as President Donald Trump demanded funding for his border wall with Mexico and Democrats refused. The agreement Trump signed on Friday that temporarily reopened the government does not provide any money for the wall.
Trump on Friday vowed to use “the powers afforded to me” to build the wall if Congress doesn’t provide funding.