Sunday 2 October 2022 08:15 PM Florida Sen Marco Rubio says he'll oppose Hurricane Ian relief funding if ... trends now

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Florida's senior senator said on Sunday that he would vote against disaster relief funds for his state if the bills contained unrelated funding for lawmakers' 'pet projects.'

Senator Marco Rubio spoke with CNN just as Floridians have begun to recover from the catastrophic damage caused by Hurricane Ian last week.

He was forced to square his current calls for relief dollars with his 2013 vote against giving the Northeast $50 billion in funding to recover from Hurricane Sandy.

'I have always voted for hurricane and disaster relief,' Rubio told CNN State of the Union. 

'What I didn't vote for in Sandy is because they had included things like a roof for museum in Washington, D.C., for fisheries in Alaska. It had been loaded up with a bunch of things that had nothing to do with disaster relief.'

Pressed on whether he would do the same in this case, Rubio said: 'Sure.'

'I will fight against it having pork in it,' he added. 

'Pork' refers to measure and funding added to a bill that are extraneous to its intended topic.

'That's the key. We shouldn't have that in there, because it undermines the ability to come back and do this in the future,' Rubio explained.