Rubio Says Bad Behavior Has to Have Consequences or Regimes Do Whatever They Want. He Was Describing Cuba.

Marco Rubio, on the Cuban government this week: “If you do bad things, bad things will happen to you.” The suffering of ordinary Cubans, he said, is the regime’s doing: “it’s their own leaders that are imposing this on them.” And the principle behind the oil blockade, the sanctions on GAESA and the ships, the whole pressure campaign: “for bad behavior, there will be consequences. There has to be,” because otherwise, he said, “regimes like this will do whatever they want.”

Every sentence of that is a sound description of how accountability works. Hold it up to the government he serves in.

It’s their own leaders that are imposing this on them. Gas was $4.15 on election day because of a war the president chose and the vice president now says cost them the Congress. Twenty-one Americans are dead in it and the bill is past $47 billion. The president’s answer on Wednesday was that he’d “have to do it again.” Rubio’s answer on Sunday, in Paris, when asked whether the midterms might change anything, was that “foreign policy will be what it is,” because the president decides it. That is the Cuban regime’s position on the blackouts, translated: the policy is the policy, and what the people think of it is noted.

If you do bad things, bad things will happen to you. The acting attorney general spent Sunday morning on CNN telling the incoming Oversight chairman that he’d “be very worried” if he were on that committee, and that asking the president’s chief of staff to answer questions might itself be a crime. The president is discussing pardons for his own officials before anyone has been charged. His Justice Department sued to impound ballots in Alaska and lost, and he has since demanded that one candidate’s votes be “immediately given” to another. These are the behaviors Rubio’s sentence is about. In Havana he calls them a regime. In Washington he calls them the administration.

For bad behavior, there will be consequences. There has to be. Here Rubio is right, and the country agreed with him on Tuesday. Seven Senate seats and the House changed hands, the largest Democratic midterm in a generation, and it was imposed by the people on their leaders, which is the direction he says consequences are supposed to run. The response from the leaders has been to call the result a mandate for more of the same, to promote the architect of the deportation campaign to run the White House, and to warn the new majority that oversight is a threat. Rubio knows what that looks like. He has spent his career describing it in Spanish.

Otherwise regimes like this will do whatever they want. On Sunday he also said the United States could “inflict tremendous damage” on the International Criminal Court unless it “sees the error of its ways.” He meant the court that indicted a head of state for how he conducted a war. The principle he applied to Cuba, that power which faces no consequence will do whatever it wants, is the principle the court exists to enforce, and he threatened it in the same breath.

I don’t doubt that Rubio means what he says about Cuba. The regime there is what he says it is. The problem is that the rule he stated has no nationality, and a man who can see it clearly ninety miles away is standing inside the exception.

---