You have to wonder if anyone on newly minted Senator Marco Rubio's staff discussed with him the pros and cons of having his very first filed amendment in the Senate be Cuba-focused?  Perhaps they thought no one would notice, since the word Cuba doesn't appear in the amendment to the Senate's FAA reauthorization bill under consideration this week, but the Tampa Tribune's The Buzz wasn't fooled, and sees in it an attempt to block the Obama administration's new regulations allowing any U.S. airport with sufficient resources to handle such flights to offer flights to Cuba. 

Until the new regulations were issued, Miami more than dominated the market with several flights in and out of Cuba daily (Los Angeles and New York offer weekly flights).  But Tampa also has a significant Cuban American population, and both the airport and Tampa Congresswoman Kathy Castor fought to expand rights to more airports around the country.

So, what would the Rubio amendment do?  (Read here for yourself - h/t to the ever vigilant folks at Cuba Central.) It would prohibit any U.S. airports from adding any more flights than there were in the previous fiscal year to countries identified by the State Department as state sponsors of terrorism.  (Cuba, Sudan, Syria and Iran are now the only countries on that list, after the Bush administration removed North Korea, Libya and Iraq.) Sounds a little complicated right?  Why wouldn't Rubio just offer an amendment to ban all flights to such countries, particularly given how strongly he seems to feel about the issue:

“Instead of doing business with regimes that undermine America’s security and routinely violate the basic norms of human dignity, we should be bolstering our democratic allies through deeper economic ties."

Boy, he seems to mean business (no pun intended), no?  So, why the half-measure?  Because leaving the flights as they were last year means Rubio's amendment won't technically ground the hundreds of thousands of Cuban Americans who were already traveling home regularly.  As much as Rubio might wish these Cuban Americans would just stay stateside and act like exiles, putting the genie back in the bottle now would endanger his standing with this sizable block of voters.

Yet, Rubio's amendment would, in fact, disrupt Cuban Americans' trips home, now that certain categories of non-Cuban Americans engaged in people-to-people, academic and religious travel to the island regained the right to travel to the island and will all have to squeeze onto the same number of planes there were last year.  But if we increase the demand for flights to Cuba without increasing the supply, legal U.S. travelers will simply be forced to travel via third countries, in essence sending revenues abroad that would have otherwise remained in the United States.  Rubio is portraying his amendment as avoiding doing business with unsavory regimes, but it wouldn't affect the intended target at all  - unless he actually expects Cuban Americans to suddenly decide they'd rather go to Panama or Colombia for a week instead of visiting with family in Cuba.  It would simply reduce business for American charter companies.

Chances are this amendment is just Rubio's way of further expressing his disapproval for the regulations. Time for debate and roll call votes is always precious in the Senate, but it's even more so with a one week recess coming up and the federal budget all anyone's talking about.  I can't imagine Senate Minority Leader McConnell wants to give up five seconds of banging the federal budget drum for Rubio's local politics vote. 

Rubio's amendment to the FAA bill - his first filed amendment as a United States senator - is a great way to prove to embargo proponents that he's still their man, but it also runs the risk of pigeon-holing the brand new senator as more concerned with hitting Cuba than helping Americans and Floridians (there is a lot more to Florida than Miami, afterall) as the country slowly crawls out of its recession.