Rubio boycotts Biden’s big speech. DeSantis declines to send Florida National Guard
As President Joe Biden prepares to deliver his first State of the Union speech Tuesday evening, two of Florida’s top Republicans are making a point to publicly shun the event.
Sen. Marco Rubio announced last month that he would boycott the speech over the strict COVID-19 guidelines, while Gov. Ron DeSantis has rejected a request to send members of the Florida National Guard to Washington for security support.
“Last week, the Biden administration requested the assistance of state national guards to deploy to Washington, D.C. I have rejected this request — there will be no @FLGuard sent to D.C. for Biden’s State of the Union,” DeSantis, a Republican and potential contender for the presidency in 2024, said on Twitter Monday.
D.C. and Capitol police made the request
While DeSantis framed the request as coming from the Biden administration, it actually originated with the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department and U.S. Capitol Police, the two law enforcement agencies that responded to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot last year and bore the brunt of the physical injuries.
The two agencies asked Biden’s administration to approve Guard support ahead of the speech.
The failure to mobilize the Guard ahead of the Electoral College count and President Donald Trump’s resistance to sending it after the riot began were closely scrutinized as lawmakers probed security failures in the wake of the attack last year.
Defense Secretary LLoyd Austin approved a request from the two agencies last week to deploy 700 members of the National Guard ahead of Biden’s address and a trucker convoy that was inspired by the anti-vaccine protest that occupied Canada’s capital city of Ottawa last month. The mission is approved through March 7, under Austin’s order.
In addition to 400 members of the D.C. National Guard deployed under the order, there will be 300 that come from New Jersey, Vermont and West Virginia. There won’t be any Floridians, but their absence won’t affect the number of guardsmen deployed.
Rubio shuns COVID-19 protocols
Another Floridian who won’t be visible Tuesday evening is the state’s senior senator, who has been saying for weeks that he will forgo Biden’s address due to the strict COVID-19 protocols.
“I’ll watch the replays on television. I don’t need to sit there and go through all of that just to make them feel good about how safe they’re being. Honestly, I’m just tired of all the COVID theater crap,” said Rubio said last week during a Wednesday appearance on Newsmax, a conservative cable channel.
Attendees of the speech, including both lawmakers and reporters, must submit to a health screening and have a negative PCR test from the day before the speech.
The initial guidance also required attendees to wear a quality mask, such as an N95 or KN95 mask, but a day before the speech the White House and Capitol announced they were relaxing their mask rules as the number of COVID cases in Washington has fallen.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki pushed back Monday on the notion that the relaxation had anything to do with the timing of the State of the Union and a desire by the president to be free of a mask when he addresses the nation in the 9 p.m. EST speech.
“I would say the president is very powerful, but he couldn’t make us be in the green zone that we’re in right now in D.C. That’s why we are not required — we’re not going to be required to wear a mask starting tomorrow,” Psaki said.
“So I would say that for him, it had nothing to do with the timing around the State of the Union. He wanted to give the CDC the time to assess and make recommendations that would be clear to the American public about what their recommendations would be for mask wearing moving forward.”
Asked if Rubio thought the relaxation of the mask rules had anything to do with his announced boycott, Rubio spokeswoman Ansley Bradwell reiterated that the Florida senator still “won’t be in attendance since tests are required to attend.”
Rubio delivered the 2013 Republican response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address.
This story was originally published March 1, 2022 at 11:43 AM with the headline "Rubio boycotts Biden’s big speech. DeSantis declines to send Florida National Guard."
