It seems that Republican now-presidential candidate Marco Rubio's trait of not showing up to do his day job didn't start when he was elected to the Senate. He did the same thing in the Florida House, where he was appointed to a plum position on the high-prestige House panel tasked with planning the state's legislative actions in the wake of 9/11. He won the spot over other lawmakers because—stop me if you've heard this one before—Republicans were eager to boost the star power of the young conservative; surely, there could be no more high-profile position in the House then being one of the twelve legislators asked to craft the state's response to the terrorism attacks a few weeks earlier.
Aaaaaaand he didn't show up for the damn job.
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. [...]
The panel was formed in September 2001. By February 2002, when members heard testimony about the bill to create the system to track foreign students, Rubio had missed six of 14 meetings that had been held, records show.
And he was badly late to a seventh, missing most of the testimony but still arriving in time to express his testimony-untainted opinions.
It's possible, and I'm just throwing this out there, that Marco Rubio is more enamored with the thought of political office than he is with doing the tasks of political office. There's nothing to be ashamed of; some people are just easily bored, when it comes to discussions of terrorism and buildings being destroyed and so forth, and are more suited to other work. Marco Rubio strikes me as the sort of person who would really benefit from switching to a career in lion-taming. Not the taming part, of course, just the part where you get to appear on television claiming you're a lion-tamer.