GOP presidential candidate Marco Rubio said Wednesday that the struggle between himself and fellow senator Ted Cruz in Tuesday's GOP debate was not personal, but they do have a "fundamental difference of opinion" on national defense.
"He talks tough about how we are going to make the sand glow in the desert, but you can only do that if you have an Air Force," the Florida senator told Fox News' Martha MacCallum on the
"America's Newsroom" program, explaining that the containment budget Cruz favors will drastically reduce the nation's military budget.
"The other is on intelligence," said Rubio. "Right now we do not have access to phone records going back five years. They are going to be deleted because of a law he supported. He aligned himself with Chuck Schumer and [Barack] Obama and the ACLU and every other liberal group in America. The older information we have we can't even use anymore. We need more tools in our intelligence tool box, not less."
Meanwhile, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie commented during the debate that as one-term senators, Rubio and Cruz would work out in office like Obama. Rubio denied Obama failed because of his initial inexperience.
"He's had seven years experience and he's worse than he was when he got there," said Rubio, turning the talk around to attack Cruz.
"That's a cute line by Chris Christie," he said. "But with all this tough talk, Ted said I'm going to utterly destroy ISIS. When you support a budget like he does that dramatically cuts defense spending, how can you argue that the bill that pays for the military that fund our troops and the Iron Dome, how can you say I'm going to utterly destroy ISIS but I'm not going to fund what it will take to utterly destroy ISIS?"
Rubio did not go after front-runner Donald Trump in the debate over his call to bar Muslims from coming into the country, and told MacCallum on Wednesday he didn't pursue the argument "because it's not a serious idea. I'm not going to spend a valuable 75 seconds on a debate stage [on that]."
The question was asked, Rubio said, to spark an argument between himself and Trump, but Trump had come up with an idea that was not significant in the days after the San Bernardino attacks to bring attention to himself.
ISIS is the most significant threat facing the United States, said Rubio, and is expanding its grip in the Middle East while plotting in Europe, Jordan and Yemen.
"We need to focus on this threat, not a plan that's not going to happen and everyone knows it," said Rubio.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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