Rubio: Paul Uses ‘Rhetoric to Distract from His Very Weak Record on Nat’l Security’

STEPHANOPOULOS: "Some evidence that one of those attackers in Paris may have been a refugee from Syria, coming through Greece. We’re not completely sure of that yet. But it has put a lot of attention on the president’s decision to increase the number of refugees from Syria. And it’s also creating some criticism for you from one of your rivals. Rand Paul says that, a couple of years ago, on the immigration bill, you blocked an amendment that would have made it more difficult for refugees with a terrorist past. Again, I want to show what he said."
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PAUL: "Two or three years ago, I introduced a bill or an amendment to the immigration bill that would have provided for more scrutiny for people coming into our country — refugees, immigrants, students. They would have had background checks. Mine was a national security amendment, as well as an immigration amendment and Marco blocked it."
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STEPHANOPOULOS: "Your response?"
RUBIO: "Well, look, Rand just uses this sort of rhetoric to distract from his very weak record on national security issues. I mean, he’s been one of the leading figures trying to gut the American intelligence programs. Think about the metadata program for a moment. Imagine if one of those strikes had occurred here in the United States. The first thing we would want to know is, what are the cell phones records of these people? Let’s say that, God forbid, what happened in Paris happened in Washington. We would want to know — we would want access to these people’s phone records, because it would give us clues as to who they were working with, who probably may be involved in plots themselves later on down the road. Rand Paul wants to get rid of that program. In fact, he’s advocated and he’s one of the leading figures behind part of that program being gutted now —" [crosstalk] 
STEPHANOPOULOS: "But did you in fact block an amendment that would have required more background checks?"
RUBIO: "No. Listen, the background checks are required now. The problem is not the background checks. The problem is we can’t background check them. You can’t pick up the phone and call Syria. And that’s one of the reasons why I said we won’t be able to take more refugees. It’s not that we don’t want to; it’s that we can’t because there’s no way to background check someone that’s coming from Syria. Who do you call and do a background check on them? The bottom line is that this is not just a threat coming from abroad. What we need to open up to and realize is that we have a threat here at home, homegrown violent extremists, individuals who perhaps have not even traveled abroad, who have been radicalized online. This has become a multi-faceted threat. In the case of what’s happening in Europe, this is a swarm of refugees. And as I’ve said repeatedly over the last few months, you can have 1,000 people come in and 999 of them are just poor people fleeing oppression and violence but one of them is an ISIS fighter. If that’s the case, you have a problem and there is no way to vet that out. There is no background check system in the world that allows us to find that out because who do you call in Syria to background check them?"