What kind of leader was Marco Rubio as speaker of Florida's house?

Rubio was not entirely a rock-ribbed conservative. Some former colleagues describe him as a centrist who sought out Democrats and groups that don’t typically align with the GOP. Early in his tenure, for instance, he set up a meeting with farmworkers to discuss their working conditions. He addressed a crowd of about 50 one night in the hall of a migrant-labor housing complex in Homestead, a farming community south of Miami; ultimately, he cosponsored legislation that would have allowed workers to sue growers in state court if they were cheated on pay. “The idea that any legislator, let alone a Republican, would reach out to farmworkers was unheard of. We were flabbergasted,” says Greg Schell, managing attorney for the Migrant Farmworker Justice Project. In the years before his speakership, Rubio would also cosponsor a bill that sought to award in-state tuition rates to the children of undocumented immigrants.

Today, Rubio has positioned himself as a foreign-policy hawk, but in the wake of 9/11, he struck a libertarian chord on national security matters. As state lawmakers considered dozens of bills to strengthen law enforcement, he expressed suspicion of measures that sought to expand police detention powers and suspend public-records laws. “I can’t ignore the fact that a lot of people I represent came to this country because of the freedoms that make it what it is,” Rubio said. “So many of these measures that we are talking about implementing were the very same ones that were forced on the people of Cuba right after Castro took over.”

In 2002, Rubio led a successful charge to quash a Republican bill that would have required all colleges to submit the visa information of foreign students to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. “I’m concerned,” he said, “that by the end of the session, immigrant and foreign-born people who are here in this country legally won’t be able to get married without a struggle, get a driver’s license without being hassled, and won’t be able to go to school without being tracked.”