Steve Benen writes, On prescription drug costs, Rubio makes a risky election year bet:
It was one of the biggest wins in the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act: For the first time, Medicare will be empowered to negotiate the cost of some of the most expensive prescription medications with the pharmaceutical industry. Democrats have worked on this issue for nearly three decades, but Big Pharma’s lobbyists successfully stood in the way. This year, Democrats succeeded anyway.
Republicans have effectively nothing to say about health care policy, with one big exception: GOP officials and candidates are eager to undo what Democrats did on drug costs.
As we discussed two weeks ago, many House Republicans haven’t just condemned the Democratic policy breakthrough, they’ve also vowed to repeal the policy at their earliest possible opportunity. In an interesting twist, some Senate Republicans are thinking along the same lines.
The Washington Post reported on Friday:
Four Republican senators, including three up for reelection, have introduced a bill that would reverse a popular provision of the Inflation Reduction Act — a means to cut drug prices for Americans. Sens. Cynthia M. Lummis (Wyo.), Mike Lee (Utah), James Lankford (Okla.) and Marco Rubio (Fla.) are backing a measure that could end Medicare’s ability to negotiate lower prescription drug costs and would limit Medicare recipients’ annual drug expenses at $2,000.
The bill itself is basically just a one-page proposal: These GOP senators want to simply roll back the clock, erasing the part of the Inflation Reduction Act that would empower the Medicare program to negotiate lower prices. The Republicans are calling their measure the “Protect Drug Innovation Act” — as if the only way to protect medicinal innovation is to keep prescription drug costs higher.
In a written statement, Little Marco Rubio characterized the Democratic measure as “price controls,” which he believes will “hurt” his constituents.
Note: Florida is frequently referred to as “God’s waiting room” because it is home to so many elderly retirees, who are on social security and Medicare and who will directly benefit from the drug pricing provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act. Rubio’s “constituents,” however, apparently are the Big Pharma lobbyists who donate to his campaign.
At face value, this isn’t altogether surprising. Indeed, one of the reasons the effort to lower costs has taken so long is that GOP officials have so consistently stood with the pharmaceutical industry against reforms.
What I do find surprising, however, are the electoral circumstances.
Wyoming’s Lummis won’t face voters again until 2026, and her re-election in one of the nation’s reddest states is all but assured. Utah’s Lee and Oklahoma’s Lankford are both up this year, but given their state’s partisan leanings, both are heavily favored.
But Rubio offers a qualitatively different kind of story. He represents Florida, after all, and the last time I checked, there are quite a few seniors in the Sunshine State who’ll benefit from the Inflation Reduction Act’s measures related to prescription drug costs.
Rubio didn’t have to endorse this, at least not before the election. There is exactly zero chance this bill will be considered in this Congress, so he had no real incentive to attach himself as a co-sponsor. It would’ve been politically smart to simply ignore this bill in the short term, while pursuing his regressive goals next year. [Rubio has never been a “smart” politician, just a lucky one in the insane politics of Florida.]
The Florida Republican nevertheless wants it to be known: Rubio is a conservative incumbent who, if re-elected, will side with pharmaceutical companies against a popular measure designed to help consumers afford their prescription medications.
It’s a bold gamble four weeks ahead of Election Day in a state filled with retirees.
Support Rep. Val Demings for Senate.
The FiveThirtyEight polling average has Val Demings trailing Rubio by only 4.6% (most of this polling is outdated, before hurricane Ian took out about 10 percent of South-Central Florida, and before Little Marco Rubio sponsored this bill to screw Florida seniors on Medicare prescription drug prices. Do Floridians know this?
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Brandon Gage reports, “Never Trumpers endorse Val Demings in ad walloping Marco Rubio for defending ‘criminal’ Donald Trump”, https://www.rawstory.com/us-news/lincoln-project-endorses-val-demings-in-ad-walloping-marco-rubio-for-defending-criminal-donald-trump/
The Lincoln Project released a new ad on Wednesday excoriating United States Senator Marco Rubio (R-Florida) over his support of former President Donald Trump.
[T]he sixty-second ad notes that Rubio’s loyalty to Trump runs deeper than partisan necessity. Rubio, it implies, abdicated his duty to the public – especially while Trump’s numerous legal entanglements worsen:
Marco Rubio wants you to think crime is a top issue in this election. So why does he spend so much time defending Donald Trump, who is at the center of nineteen criminal and civil cases from tax fraud to stealing documents to trying to violently overthrow an election?
Rubio backs Trump, not law and order. He attacks the FBI and law enforcement. So much for ‘backing the blue.’
The spot then endorses Rubio’s opponent in the November midterms – retired Orlando police chief and two-term Florida Democratic Congresswoman Val Demings:
That’s why in the US Senate, Val Demings will be everything Rubio isn’t. Hard-working, smart, effective, brave, and strong enough to speak out in the face of injustice. Val’s record of service, bravery, and putting her life on the line for a safer Florida, has always come down to doing the right thing.
https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1580370928210350080?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1580370928210350080%7Ctwgr%5E263e23f05cdd48b0cf72ec6b8bec76523f527151%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rawstory.com%2Fr%2Fentryeditor%2F2658445077publish
Lizette Alvarez writes, “How a law-and-order Democrat could disrupt Rubio’s glide to reelection”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/10/demings-challenges-rubio-florida/
[T]hese days, Rubio is a 51-year-old career politician who appears locked on reelection autopilot. He holds few campaign events. He flip-flops (on immigration, on Donald Trump) and chronically misses Senate votes, seeming unconcerned about the possibility of giving his opponents weapons to use against him.
A sense of entitlement runs deep in career politicians. And maybe Florida’s increasingly Republican leanings will be enough to let Rubio coast to victory in November. Recent polling favors him; the FiveThirtyEight average pegging him with a 4.6-percentage-point lead includes polls with Rubio leads of up to 7 points and as few as 2.
Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.) would like to focus on the polls within the margin of error. It is difficult to imagine a Democratic challenger with a résumé better suited to unseating Rubio. She’s a Black, centrist, law-and-order politician, with 27 years in law enforcement, four of them as Orlando police chief. During that time, the city’s violent-crime rate dropped 40 percent. Did I mention she drives a red Harley?
Demings wields her law-enforcement experience as a different kind of police shield: It deflects the soft-on-crime attacks that Republicans trot out every election cycle. Rubio has, of course, accused Demings of wanting to “defund the police,” to which she responds, “I am the police.” And she points out that while “Rubio was home in his bed sleeping,” she was confronting real-world dangers. Her background also makes it easier to fend off jabs about gun reform.
Joe Biden was impressed enough by her that he put Demings, elected to the House in 2016, on his short list for vice president. Many Americans got to know her as one of the House managers of Trump’s first impeachment.
Rubio has plenty of advantages in this race. He is a household name from voter-rich Miami-Dade County; he’s a Republican running in a midterm election, which typically favors the party out of power; and, well, this is ever-redder Florida.
“The math gets hard,” Steve Schale, a Democratic strategist who ran the 2008 Obama-Biden campaign in Florida, told me. “But it’s not impossible.”
What could make it possible? There are lots of signs. For one, she held a $12 million fundraising lead over Rubio as of Sept. 2. The website Florida Politics notes that even if Rubio polls ahead of Demings, “a plurality of voters say he’s doing a bad job as Senator.”
And then there’s the campaigning by the “Chief,” as her staff calls her. Demings has combined old-school handshaking appearances with TikTok savvy. She has crisscrossed the state and plastered screens with ads hammering Rubio’s weaknesses. She has energized Black voters and is working the Latino vote — long neglected by the party.
Though plenty of Floridians are devoted to Trump and his acolytes, certainly some have soured on the former president. That could sap support for the senator who once labeled Trump a “con man” and accused him of spending “his entire career sticking it to the little guy,” but is now a die-hard defender.
Rubio has showed little interest in investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, invasion of the U.S. Capitol. And, early on, Rubio, vice chair of the Select Committee on Intelligence, dismissed Trump’s mishandling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago as a “storage” issue.
Then there’s abortion. Rubio has said that he personally favors banning abortion with no exceptions for rape or incest, but would accommodate such exceptions, if necessary, because he realizes that others don’t share his views. He signed on to the ill-fated legislation Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) sponsored last month to federally ban abortion in most cases after 15 weeks.
Demings’s ads have gone after Rubio on abortion. “I know something about fighting crime, Sen. Rubio,” she says in one. “Rape is a crime. Incest is a crime. Abortion is not.” Rubio has countered by accusing her of supporting abortion “up to birth”; Demings has said she supports some restrictions after a fetus becomes viable.
While Rubio seems focused on waging a culture-war campaign, Demings tends toward bread-and-butter issues: She touts her votes on reducing inflation, lowering prescription drug prices, capping costs for diabetes medication and repairing infrastructure — initiatives that Rubio has voted against.
In an appearance on “The View” last year, Demings vowed to “talk to people who look like me and people who don’t look like me about the things that they care about.” Floridians might like what they hear — if they’re listening.