Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz’s month-long battle over surveillance programs and national security spilled into Tuesday’s night debate, where the two squared off over each other’s voting record.
After questioning from CNN’s Dana Bash, Cruz defended his vote for the USA Freedom Act, which helped replace certain portions of the PATRIOT Act upon their expiration — something Rubio voted against.
“I’m very proud to have joined with conservatives in the Senate and the House to reform how we target bad guys, and what the USA Freedom Act did is it did two things,” Cruz said. “One, it ended the federal government’s bulk collection of phone metadata of millions of law abiding citizens, but two, and the second half of it that is critical, it strengthened the tools of national security and law enforcement to go after terrorists that gave us greater tools, and we are seeing those tools work right now in San Bernardino.”
“But in particularly what it did is the prior program only covered a relatively narrowly slice of phone calls,” Cruz said. The Texas senator explained that the newly-passed act covers more forms of communication than the PATRIOT Act did.
Bash continued on to ask Rubio about Cruz’s vote, which he said was wrong because of expiration of the collection of metadata, something Rubio continues to see as a “valuable tool.”
“He is [wrong], and so are those that voted for it,” Rubio started, adding that some voted for it just to keep some programs “alive.” “Here’s the world we live in: This is a radical jihadist group that is increasingly sophisticated,” he added, citing its ability to radicalize American citizens, and exploit loopholes in the U.S. immigration system.
“We are now at a time when we need more tools, not less tools, and that tool we lost, the metadata program, was a valuable tool that we no longer have at our disposal,” Rubio argued.
Cruz pressed that Rubio’s continued attacks are incorrect, calling them “Alinsky-like.”
“There is nothing that we are able to do under this bill that we could not do before. This bill did, however, take away a valuable tool that allowed the [NSA] and other intelligence agencies to quickly and rapidly access phone records with other phone records to see who terrorists have been calling,” Rubio said.
“I promise you that the next time there is an attack on this country, the first thing people are going to want to know is why didn’t we know about it and why didn’t we stop it, and the answer better not be because we didn’t have access to records or information that would have allowed us to identify these killers before they attacked us.”
