WASHINGTON- Senator Marco Rubio’s convulsive career reinvention took a new turn Monday.

A benefactor of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s pitiless machine politics, Rubio will pinch-hit for the increasingly beleaguered Richard Burr, the disgraced North Carolina senator who has resigned his chairmanship of the upper chamber’s vaunted Intelligence Committee. Rubio, who mounted an underachieving run for president four years ago, remains a perpetual rising star of the GOP. 

“I am glad to announce that Senator Marco Rubio has accepted my invitation to serve as Acting Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,” McConnell said Monday. “The senior senator for Florida is a talented and experienced Senate leader with expertise in foreign affairs and national security matters. Senator Rubio was the natural choice.”

Rubio fills the void for Sen. Burr—whose political survival is in doubt after a devastating insider trading scandal amidst a national pandemic and a fresh, knives-out attitude towards China. Rubio is under 50 and a commanding orator; hailing from a megastate, the hawkish senator is a palliative selection to lead a committee with a battered reputation following the troubled Russiagate investigation.

In 2016, Rubio sought the nation’s top office as an unvarnished champion of free enterprise and empire. In 2020, his temporary appointment will serve as another feather in his political cap as he seeks to rebrand as a more skeptical, burnished champion of the common good.