The Tampa Bay Times digs into Rubio’s record in the Senate and finds unsurprisingly that he has skipped out on most of his committee responsibilities:

A new, sweeping review of all committees Rubio has sat on since taking office in 2011 paints a bleak picture of participation in the day-to-day responsibilities of the job.

Rubio is on the Foreign Relations, Intelligence, Commerce and Small Business and Entrepreneurship committees. The Florida Republican has missed 68 percent of hearings, or 407 of 598 for which records were available.

His skipped 80 percent of Commerce hearings and 85 percent of those held by Small Business, records show.

He has missed 60 percent of Foreign Relations hearings since joining the Senate despite making his committee experience a centerpiece of his qualifications for president [bold mine-DL].

The report goes on to say that the figures account for the period until November 2015, and that “Rubio’s absenteeism has only worsened as he has hit the campaign trail full-time.” It’s been an open secret for a while that Rubio doesn’t like being in the Senate, and even before he was running for president he was frequently an absentee senator. His presidential campaign has since drawn more attention to a longstanding problem while making the problem even worse. Rubio has dodged most of the day-to-day work required by his job, and now he is trying to take credit for the “experience” that his committee assignments provide him.

This seems to fit into a pattern of behavior for Rubio that goes back to his time in the state legislature in Florida. The Post reports today that he fought to be added to a special panel on security after 9/11 and then missed almost half of the meetings:

Rubio did not give the job the attention that legislative leaders expected. He skipped nearly half of the meetings over the first five months of the panel’s existence, more than any of his colleagues, according to Florida legislature records. He missed hours of expert testimony and was absent for more than 20 votes — prompting the state House speaker who had given him the assignment to express concern, the committee’s chairman said.

No doubt Rubio wanted to be able to cite membership on the panel to show that he was taking security issues seriously, but his conduct on the panel shows that he didn’t take the position or its responsibilities very seriously at all. Now he wants to tout his very limited foreign policy experience as a qualification to be president, but he has failed to show up for work on the Foreign Relations Committee more than half of the time that he’s been in office. Rubio likes the prestige that his positions give him, but he doesn’t seem very interested in doing the work that goes along with them. Maybe voters don’t care about this, but it would be strange if they wanted to promote someone with such a shoddy record.