TAMPA, Fla. — One of Florida's senators is mounting a final last-ditch effort to get the Olympics moved out of China, partially in response to concerns about slave labor.
Yes, we're talking about the 2022 Winter Games – the ones scheduled to begin less than two weeks from now in Beijing.
Cities typically spend about a decade preparing for the Olympics. Republican Sen. Marco Rubio is hoping organizers can relocate this one in, well, a matter of days. He made similar requests in July, October and December.
Rubio and fellow Republican Sen. James Lankford, of Oklahoma, went ahead and introduced a resolution asking the International Olympic Committee to move the 2022 Beijing Winter Games. They say it should be done "in response to the Chinese Communist Party’s refusal to acknowledge and stop its egregious human rights abuses."
"These abuses include genocide, slave labor, and crimes against humanity that are a direct attempt to gradually eliminate vulnerable ethnic and religious groups such as the Uyghurs in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)," Rubio's office wrote in a statement.
Just last month, President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan forced labor law that Rubio helped introduce. It will block the United States from allowing the entrance of goods that were produced through the slave labor of Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim ethnic groups in China.
In an appearance on the Megyn Kelly Show, Rubio also took issue with any American companies that choose to remain silent on the issue.
Rubio is a senior member of the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee. He's also a ranking member on the Congressional-Executive Commission on China.
