Senator Marco Rubio railed against the Obama administration’s “culture of intimidation” today during a speech on the Senate floor. “In the span of four days, three major revelations have been made regarding the use of government power to intimidate those who are doing things the government doesn’t like,” Rubio said regarding news of Benghazi whistleblowers being threatened, the IRS targeting conservative groups and the DOJ secretly monitoring personal and work phone lines of AP reporters. “These are the tactics of the third world. These are the tactics of places that don’t have the freedoms and the independence that we have here in this country.”
But none of this is new, Rubio argued. “What we see emerging here is a pattern, a culture of intimidation, of hardball politics.” The Florida senator then pointed to the cases of Frank VanderSloot, the major Mitt Romney donor who was subjected to two IRS audits after being named on Obama’s enemies list, and ProPublica, the “progressive-leaning investigative journalism group” the IRS released the confidential applications of nine conservative groups to. “This is not just limited to the IRS, this is a culture of intimidation,” Rubio said. “There was South Carolina and Boeing who decided to relocate its operations … the NLRB came after them. … They were going after them because the union in Washington State was upset.”
This type of culture is what’s expected from an administration that’s “all about politics,” he argued—when an administration deliberately attempts to divide the American people on every issue and rewards political advantage.
“If the government has too much power, it almost always ends up destructive.”