Steube on Rubio as Trump’s VP

by Sharon Rondeau

(May 9, 2024) — Just after noon EDT on Thursday’s “The Benny Show,” host Benny Johnson asked guest and congressman Greg Steube about his thoughts on the possibility of 2024 presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump choosing Sen. Marco Rubio as his running-mate, a topic Johnson also covered on his show Monday.

The segment begins at the 45:23 mark in the recording.

As he did on Monday, Johnson indicated that murmuring he is hearing from various sources, including “the campaign,” appears to point to Rubio as Trump’s first choice for vice president.

Bloomberg, Johnson reported Monday, claimed Rubio to be among four top contenders on Trump’s VP list, along with U.S. Senator JD Vance, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott.

Johnson, Rubio and Steube all reside in Florida. A former attorney, infantryman and Army JAG officer who enlisted after the 9-11 attacks on the United States, Steube is serving a third term representing Florida’s 17th district.

A well-known member of Congress and 2016 presidential candidate, Rubio is currently serving his third term as U.S. senator.

The two first discussed the four criminal cases brought against Trump which Steube, after acknowledging his legal background, characterized as “a dumpster fire, all created by Democrats.”

“They don’t really care if he gets convicted; they would love for him to get convicted and go to jail; that’s their ultimate goal, but their intention was to keep him off the campaign trail and have him spend millions upon millions of dollars defending himself…” Steube said.

“What my concern is here is I hope and I pray that this jury is not going to be political in their decision,” he said of the case filed by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charging Trump with falsifying business documents in 2016, purportedly to protect his campaign.

“New York’s 85% Democrat, and I hope they’re going to look at all this the way a jury should look at this and be like, ‘This is insane’…,” Steube further said.

A Trump supporter who has campaigned with the 45th president, Steube decried what he said is “the full-on weaponization of the federal government where they are using the tools in the criminal justice system to go after their political opponent six months before an election (48:07). This is like stuff you see in Venezuela.”

“Everyday Americans see this for what it is,” he continued, noting that Trump’s polls in “swing states” he did not win previously indicate he is leading over Joe Biden.

Shifting to the topic of elections, Johnson commented on the state of Georgia, where Gov. Brian Kemp just signed an election-integrity bill, SB 189, which, according to the Washington Examiner, “removes the Secretary of State from the State Election Board and bars local election officials, elections board and Secretary of State employees from securing state contracts specific to voting equipment. It also sets deadlines for submitting absentee ballots, establishes additional ballot chain of custody rules starting in 2025 and eliminates QR codes on ballots starting in 2026.”

Johnson opined that Georgia followed Florida’s example of clean, efficient elections, which underwent major changes since the unprecedented fallout from the 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore.

“It’s election night; it’s 7:00, and you know who won,” Johnson asserted of Florida’s current election process.

“…by an hour in, everybody in the state of Florida, including, like, the presidential level…we know the results,” Steube agreed, “and that tells you that there’s not shenanigans going on here.”

In “Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin,” Steube said, “where, like, 600,000 or 300,000 ballots show up at 3:00 in the morning, there’s a lot of suspicion there that there’s a lot of things going on that shouldn’t be going on.”

“Moving to the legal matters, because there are some big ‘Florida’ questions that are being asked…” Johnson introduced the next subject. In response, Steube elaborated on Special Counsel Jack Smith’s “classified documents” case against Trump for which U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon canceled a May 20 trial, substituting a bevy of interim hearings for issues she said must be resolved before any trial can take place.

After Trump is re-elected, Steube affirmatively told Johnson, “we are going to clean house in the DOJ…and people like Alvin Bragg deserve to be prosecuted for presecutorial misconduct.”

More discussion on the Trump cases ensued as well as the “spying” which took place on the part of the FBI and CIA against the 2016 Trump campaign for which no one was held accountable, Steube contended.

“There should be a reckoning to rewrite and reset the justice system in our country back to the way it should be: fair — in a fair and balanced approach to the law, and if you broke the law…you should be held accountable,” he said.

Johnson then termed Florida the “center of the political universe,” redirecting back to Rubio as Trump’s presumptive VP. “Your thoughts on that…I guess somebody would have to move…” Johnson said. “Can you talk us through what would happen there?…”

In response, Steube said Trump is considering an array of individuals but has not spoken with him about it. As for Rubio, Steube explained, “There is a piece in the Constitution that doesn’t allow the president and the vice president to hail from the same state, so I think something would have to happen there if he did pick somebody from Florida. And then that would also cause a lot of other issues, too, because Marco’s in the middle of his Senate term, so then the governor would have to appoint for the remainder of that term…we’ve got a lot of great Americans and leaders in the State of Florida, and that’s why the president is looking there…that is some concerns that you can have from a constitutional perspective.”

Steube was referring to the 12th Amendment, which changed the manner in which the Electoral College cast its votes for president and vice president to prevent inter-party clashes.

Under Article II, Section 1, clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution, members of the Electoral College voted for president and vice president separately. According to Encyclopedia Britannica:

In 1796, though there was not yet a clear procedure for selecting partisan candidates, informal and secretive caucuses were held for the parties’ congressional delegations to choose presidential and vice presidential nominees. The Democratic-Republicans chose Jefferson, and the Federalists nominated Vice Pres. John Adams. Neither party was able to decide on a vice presidential candidate. At the time, however, the Constitution—not having anticipated the rise of the party system—stated that the candidate with the second highest total of votes would become vice president.

Therefore, Adams won the presidency and Jefferson the vice presidency, though hailing from opposing political factions.

In 1800, Adams and Jefferson again sought the presidency, but with running-mates in line with their political views.

A congressional annotation of the 12th Amendment states:

Ratified in 1804, the Twelfth Amendment superseded Article II, Section 1, Clause 3 of the Constitution. Under Article II as originally ratified, the Electoral College did not vote separately for President and Vice President. Instead, each elector voted for two candidates for President. If one candidate received votes from a majority of the electors, he became President, while the candidate with the second-highest number of votes became Vice President.¹ However, if two candidates received votes from a majority of electors, or if no candidate received a majority, the House of Representatives was to choose the President. Problems arose under the original system in the election of 1800, when Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr received the same number of votes in the Electoral College, sending the selection of a President to the House of Representatives, despite the fact that the electors had intended Jefferson to be President and Burr to be Vice President.²

The Twelfth Amendment was designed to avoid a repetition of the events of 1800 by having the electors vote separately for President and Vice President, with each elector casting one vote for each office. The Constitution’s original system at times could result, as it did in the election of 1796, in the selection of a President and Vice President with different political alignments, while the Twelfth Amendment simplified the process for selecting a President and Vice President from the same political party. The Supreme Court has thus stated that the Amendment both acknowledg[ed] and facilitat[ed] the Electoral College’s emergence as a mechanism not for deliberation but for party-line voting.³

Since the Twelfth Amendment was ratified, Congress and the states have made other changes to presidential elections. Following the disputed election of 1876, Congress enacted a statute providing that if a state’s vote is not certified by the governor under seal, it shall not be counted unless both Houses of Congress concur.⁴ In addition, in 1933, the Twentieth Amendment superseded some provisions of the Twelfth Amendment.⁵

The 12th Amendment begins:

The Electors shall meet in their respective states and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves;…

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who launched a presidential bid but abruptly suspended it following the January Iowa caucuses and is often mentioned as a possible VP pick, would present the same challenge, as would anyone from Florida.

In 2019 Trump declared his legal residency to be the Sunshine State rather than New York, where he launched his real-estate business, growing it to international heights.

Not discussed in the interview was the question of whether Rubio is constitutionally eligible to the vice-presidency in accordance with another provision of the U.S. Constitution: Article II, Section 1, clause 5, which requires the president be a “natural born Citizen.”

While controversy exists over the precise meaning of the term, some scholars believe a “natural born Citizen” is none other than an individual born in the United States to two U.S.-citizen parents so as to avoid the possibility of foreign influence or allegiance as expressed in a letter from Founding Father John Jay to Constitutional Convention Chairman George Washington.”

It is also widely known that the Framers often referenced Emmerich de Vattel’s “The Law of Nations,” which expounded on the nature of citizenship and “natural-born citizens,” defining the latter as “those born in the country, of parents who are citizens.”

Rubio was born in Miami in 1971, though his parents were born in Cuba and arrived in the United States as escapees from the communist regime which befell the island nation following Fidel Castro’s January 1, 1959 deposing of Fulgencio Batista.