Republican presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who has missed more votes than any other senator, made a rare appearance on Capitol Hill Tuesday to argue for a bill that would crack down on federal employees who don't do their jobs.
"All we're saying in this bill is if you work at [Veterans Affairs] and you aren't doing your job, they get to fire you. I think people are shocked that that [doesn't] actually exist in the entire government, since there is really no other job in the country where if you don't do your job, you don't get fired," Rubio said somewhat ironically, reported CBS News.
Rubio said that his legislation would make it easier for the government to fire or demote Department of Veterans Affairs workers based on performance.
"In this instance we're just limiting to one agency," he added. "This should actually be the rule in the entire government. If you're not doing your job, you should be fired. But this is limiting to the VA because we've got a crisis there with the lack of accountability."
So far this year, Rubio has missed 88 Senate votes, or more than 30 percent, according to the GovTrack website.
Since coming to the Senate in 2011, Rubio has missed 11.6 percent of all roll call votes, compared to the 1.6 percent average of his fellow colleagues, noted Vice News.
His first vote in almost a month also came Tuesday in support of ending federal funding to sanctuary cities that protect illegal immigrants from deportation by refusing to cooperate with federal immigration authorities seeking to deport them. The bill needed 60 votes to overcome the procedural hurdle but only managed to get 54 votes, as HNGN previously reported.
Rubio defended his poor attendance record in an interview with NBC's "Today Show" earlier this month, arguing that voting isn't the most important job for an elected representative.
"No, in fact the majority of the job of being a senator is not walking on to the Senate floor and lifting your finger on a noncontroversial issue and seeing which way you're going to vote," Rubio told NBC. "The majority of the work of a senator is the constituent service to committee work, that continues forward unabated."
He added: "My ambitions aren't for me; my ambitions are for the country and Florida. And that's why I'm running for president."
However, as PolitiFact noted, four other senators – Rand Paul, R-Ky., Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Ted Cruz, R-Texas – are also running for president and have managed to sustain better voting records than Rubio.
