Rubio fires back at Ryan on budget

Sen. Marco Rubio fired back at Rep. Paul Ryan Friday after the GOP budget guru suggested the Florida senator is opposing the budget deal without having read it.

{mosads}“I knew full well all the details of the important parts that were in it. In fact they had been leaked days in advance, they had been leaked hours in advance,” Rubio (R-Fla.) said on CBS. 

“There was an understanding in this building, including from among our conferees about what it included, and it had fundamental things we were well aware of,” Rubio said.

Rubio and a number of other Republican senators have bashed the budget pact that Ryan (R-Wis.) negotiated with his Senate counterpart, Senate Budget Committe Chairwoman Patty Murray (D-Wash.).

Asked Thursday about Rubio’s criticism of the deal, Ryan said the senator should “read the deal and get back to me.”

The war of words between Rubio and Ryan is part of a broader split that has emerged in the field of possible GOP presidential candidates for 2016.

Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) have also come out against the agreement, leaving Ryan to defend a deal that has drawn fierce criticism from the right.

Rubio said he partly opposed the deal because it breaks the budget caps set by sequestration. The bill replaces $63 billion in sequester cuts in the next two years and raises budget caps to just over $1 trillion. 

Rubio, who has worked on immigration reform with Democrats, said compromise cannot be an end in itself. 

“Compromise just for the sake of compromise, so we can feel good about each other, I don’t think is progress for the country,” he said. 

Ryan, on the other hand, has hailed the pact as an important breakthrough, saying it’s the first time in nearly two decades that a divided Congress had reached such a deal.

“I wouldn’t say it’s big in numbers. It’s big in symbolism,” Ryan told ABC on Thursday. “This is the first time, with a divided Congress, that we’ve had a budget agreement since 1986 when both Houses were controlled by the other parties.”

Rubio also weighed in on Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) criticism of conservative outside groups that came out strongly against the budget deal. 

The senator said all outside groups have the right to express their opinion and that he respects what Boehner and Ryan are trying to do.