Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Federalist Society’s 2026 National Lawyers Convention

Official Statements

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “Marco Rubio, Secretary of State Washington, D.C. Mayflower Hotel Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Federalist Society’s 2026 National Lawyers Convention Remarks November 13, 2026”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “MS Rubio: Thank you. Thank you. Good evening, everyone. My name is Daniella Rubio, and it is my honor and privilege to introduce our distinguished speaker for this year’s Barbara K. Olson Memorial Lecture. Before we begin, I would like to invite everyone to join us for a reception at the promenade immediately following the lecture. We hope you will be able to join us.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “Secretary of State Marco Rubio was born in Miami, Florida in 1971. He is the son of Cuban immigrants who left Cuba in pursuit of the American dream. His father worked as a banquet bartender, while his mother split time as a stay-at-home mom and hotel maid. From an early age, Rubio learned the importance of faith, family, community, and dignified work. His commitment to public service was deeply influenced by conversations with his grandfather, who had witnessed firsthand the devastating effects of communism on his homeland.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “Inspired by his family’s story and his belief in the promise of America, Rubio embarked on a career in public service that would take him from local government to the highest levels of national leadership. After marrying his wife Jeanette, Rubio began his political career as a city commissioner in West Miami before serving in the Florida House of Representatives, where he ultimately rose to become speaker. In 2010, he was elected to represent Florida in the United States Senate, where he served for nearly 14 years.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “During his tenure in the Senate, Rubio served on several influential committees, including the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the Senate Appropriations Committee, and the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship. He became particularly active on issues involving U.S. foreign policy, national security, and America’s relationships with countries across the world.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “Among his legislative accomplishments, Rubio was a leading force behind the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, co-led legislation supporting human rights and democracy in Hong Kong, and worked with President Trump to increase pressure on the Cuban regime, including efforts targeting the regime’s military-controlled business empire. In November 2024, President Donald Trump nominated Rubio to serve as the 72nd Secretary of State.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “On January 20th, 2025, the United States Senate unanimously confirmed his nomination by a vote of 99 to zero, making him the first member of President Trump’s second cabinet. Rubio was sworn in as Secretary of State on January 21st, 2025. As America’s chief diplomat, he leads the Department of State in carrying out the President’s foreign policy and advancing Americans’ interests around the world. His stated priority is to lead a department that puts America first.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “In his capacity as the President’s National Security Advisor, he leads the National Security Council and coordinates the America First foreign policy across the interagency. And while all of these professional achievements are truly remarkable, his greatest accomplishment cannot be measured by titles, awards, or accolades. Beyond all that he has achieved professionally, his greatest legacy will always be the value he has instilled, the importance of always putting the Lord first.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “And this is the example that he has set for my family: his love for a great nation and the defense of our basic rights. And for that reason, more than any other, I am most proud and most grateful and most fortunate to call him Dad. (Applause.) Now, without further ado, please join me in welcoming the 72nd Secretary of State of the United States, my father, Marco Rubio. (Applause.)”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “Secretary Rubio: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Was that cool or what? (Laughter.) My kids, I used to bring them on stage and show them off, now they’re introducing - I don’t know where she got this. Has no stage fright, she’s not afraid to speak. I mean, I don’t really like public speaking that much, but she - (laughter) - she, on the other hand - that’s fantastic.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “That’s great. Thank you, Danielle. You did very good. She’s a third-year law student at the University of Virginia. I heard that’s a good law school. (Laughter.) I hope it is. (Applause.) I hope it is, because it’s expensive law school. It’s - (laughter) - I hope it is. No, she’s great. And of course my wife Janette is here as well. And I was also a lawyer, but I was a different kind of lawyer.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “I was a land use and zoning attorney, and I always tell them as a land use and zoning attorney, if you ever wind up in court, something went horribly wrong. (Laughter.) She, on the other hand, is going to be like a real lawyer. So we’re - she’s fantastic, and it’s an honor to be with all of you here today, and thank you. And primarily I am here in this collection of lawyers - how many - are there any lawyers here? (Laughter.) Good.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “Thank you, because on election night there was a congressman that said we all needed to lawyer up, so here we are. (Laughter and applause.) Anyway, anyway, so - and on a serious topic, less than two years into Ronald Reagan’s first term in office, you know that everything sort of seemed headed in the wrong direction. It’s hard for us to remember that right now, but that’s what it was like. After his first two years in office, things seemed headed in the wrong direction.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “He had won a stunning landslide victory. He had been hailed as a conservative - which was hailed as a conservative revolution and upended the political establishment. He’d been swept into office with this ambitious political mandate, he survived an assassination attempt, and he promptly delivered on a signature campaign promise, which was a historic tax cut, and he did all of this in the first eight months of his presidency.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “But by early 1982 - which, by the way, I think I was in sixth grade - but by early 1982, celebrations had given way to a growing sense of gloom. The Reagan administration was facing its first major political crisis. In less than a year, the approval ratings of the Reagan administration had plummeted from - by 25 points, from 68 percent down to 43 percent.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “By March of 1982 - think about this, what I’m about to tell you, for a moment - by March of 1982, President Reagan was four points less popular than Jimmy Carter at the same point at his term. The economy had taken a nosedive. In fact, it faced a full-fledged recession. Unemployment was approaching double digits, the worst it had been in 40 years, with many, fairly or unfairly, blaming the president for all of this.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “Even his foreign policy ambitions were beginning to lose ground, with rising fears of nuclear war with Russia spilling out into a popular revolt against his efforts to take on the Soviet communism around the world. On all fronts, the Reagan administration and the conservative movement at that time was on the defensive.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “But it was against that backdrop that I just described to you in 1982 - which, by the way, also culminated in devastating losses for the president’s parties in Congress - it was against that backdrop, amid plummeting morale, the anxiety, the despair, that something new began to stir. And it was - at that time it was little more than just an idea. It was germinating in just a few law schools - common - in the common rooms of several law schools and lecture halls.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “But soon what was stirring would remake the whole landscape of American politics and law, forever changing the course of the nation. In April of 1982, in the middle of everything I just described to you, there were four law school students that organized a symposium on federalism in New Haven, Connecticut. About 200 people came. One of the speakers that came was this 46-year-old professor from Chicago. His name was Antonin Scalia, and he diagnosed a basic problem to the room.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “He said conservatives have simply been outgunned at the federal level for half a century. And, of course, nowhere was that more obvious at the time than in the courts. Republicans had won three of the last four presidential elections. Seven of the nine justices at the time on the Supreme Court had been appointed by Republican presidents, and yet none of it seemed to matter much at all.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “Nine years earlier, the court had delivered its ruling on Roe v. Wade. Five of the seven votes for the decision were Republican appointees. The majority opinion was written by a justice who had been nominated by President Richard Nixon. The most consistent conservative on that court was William Rehnquist, and he spent much of his time as the lone voice of dissent - so much so that his law clerks gifted him a doll of the Lone Ranger. (Laughter.)”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “At the time, only one major law school in the country had a conservative student journal. By the way, it happened to be Harvard. It had been founded four years earlier. And the very term “originalism” itself was only two years old, and it wasn’t coined by an originalist. It was coined by a liberal Stanford professor in an article written to criticize and refute the concept. Just a few years later, a sitting justice on the Supreme Court would dismiss this idea of originalism.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “He would dismiss it as, quote, “little more than arrogance cloaked as humility,” sneering that its advocates were “persons who have no familiarity with the historical record.” This was how the Federalist Society began. But your critics aren’t sneering anymore. The Federalist Society helped to change and advance America, and there are many lessons for us to learn today from that success. One of those lessons is that politics requires more than simply winning elections, because the government is not the only source of political power.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “Power also lives in the universities. Power lives in the press. Power lives in the whole expanse of civil society, all of the institutions that define and shape our understanding of ourselves as a nation and as a people. Every society - and I mean every society - has an elite, has a ruling class. And in ours, that class resides not just in the White House, not just in Congress or the courts, it also resides in academia, in powerful nonprofits, and in nongovernment organizations.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “It resides in corporate board rooms and C-suites and think tanks and journals, in foundations and in mass media, stretching across the commanding heights of business and education and culture. This is something that the left over the last six decades has frankly often understood better than the right. Elections, elections decide who holds office for a season.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “But elections, they do not - they do not decide by themselves what our institutions teach or what our lawyers believe, which ideas are treated as respectable or normal, and which are deemed beyond the pale. The government, of course, can and does play a critical role in shaping these things. But the government can’t fundamentally transform them into two or four or - it can’t transform them in just two, four, or eight years.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “That kind of change - that of change is implemented over the course of a generation or more, and even then only through the dedicated work of a coalition of allies across institutions, working together both inside and outside of the state. The Federalist Society’s victories were built on this insight. It’s not just about placing good judges in positions to interpret the law.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “It’s about shaping the world in which they do so, about shaping the norms and the values, the ideas and beliefs, the expectations and the assumptions, that underpin how they think and reason and act. Who defines these things and to what end - that is what power is. That’s not unique to our country’s legal system. At the State Department, we have seen the same thing firsthand in the realm of what is called international law.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “We’ve heard the concept international law invoked against nearly every major foreign policy decision or action of this administration. So, for example, when President Trump ordered our military to sink cartel boats in the Caribbean, we were told that they were violating international law. The founding chief prosecutor of the fake and illegitimate International Criminal Court even accused us of crimes against humanity.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “When American forces captured Nicolás Maduro, a fugitive of American justice, and brought him to the United States to face that justice, we heard the same - (applause) - when we did that, we heard the same accusations from the highest levels of the - I’m not going to call them a name - the United Nations. (Laughter.)”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “Even the enforcement of our immigration laws - even the enforcement of our own immigration laws here on American soil - has faced this attack. Earlier this year, for example, groups like the ACLU were petitioning the United Nations to investigate ICE’s blatant violations of international law here in the United States.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “Over the past decade, we’ve received an endless barrage of claims about America’s alleged violations of international rules and norms, ranging from our foreign policy to our border enforcement to even what they call - what they call - our systemic racism.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “Even on the issue of abortion, for example, when Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2022, it was swiftly denounced by a cadre of, you guessed it, UN human rights experts, an oxymoron - (laughter) - as a betrayal of America’s binding legal obligations under international law.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “None of this has anything to do - none of this has anything to do - with any real higher standard of justice. It is a function of the people who control the official organs of global governance. It is the function of the sprawling network of NGOs and agencies staffed by international activists and bureaucrats, along with their patrons here in the United States and around the world.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “For this global elite, international law is not a neutral body of rules; international law is an instrument, an instrument to advance their interests under the pretense of universal principles. For example, they’re staunch defenders of democracy - until particular elections challenge their interests. They lecture us on the importance of sovereignty even as they demand that nations surrender control of their borders and outsource their immigration laws to unelected international courts.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “They oppose, they say, all forms of imperialism, of conquest, of domination, but they seek to exercise authority over every country and every government on Earth. That’s why, earlier this year, President Trump made the unprecedented decision to sanction the fake International Criminal Court - (applause) - a fake court which is an unelected world tribunal, which claims to supersede the laws and constitutions of sovereign states, even those who never signed up for it.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “Americans have never agreed to submit to the ICC’s authority, but that court and its allies in the global bureaucracy have appointed themselves judge and jury and executioner of the international order, ruling over all but account - ruling over all. They’re ruling - they think they have the right to rule over everyone, but they are accountable to no one, armed with the power to investigate, to prosecute, to persecute, and to jail our citizens according to laws we neither consent nor control.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “They can certainly try, I would say. But if they’re foolish enough to try to enforce their paper decrees on Americans, our answer will probably be the same as the Roman general, Pompey, when he said to those who were trying to invoke their cities’ charters against his legions. He said, “Stop quoting laws to men with swords.” (Laughter.) Not politically correct to say that, but that’s what he said. That’s what he said. (Applause.)”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “Anyway, look, the weaponization of international law is not altogether different from what we’ve seen here at home. The activist courts who seek to govern by injunction, twisting the law to fit whatever their preferences happen to be at any given place or time; their allies in the academy, in the press, the professional activist class - the same people who just a few years earlier were denouncing the Constitution, okay?”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “These are the same people who just a few years ago were saying and denouncing the Constitution as a racist and backwards document that was written by slaveowners designed only to protect the interest of wealthy white men. These same people now wax poetic about how - defending our principles of government and how they’re carrying out their constitutional duties. For these people - for these people - the fundamental purpose of the law, American law and international law alike, is to weaken the United States.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “It is to undermine our power as a sovereign nation to act. It is to hinder the American Government’s ability to defend American interests at home and abroad.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “They tell us that we are compelled by a sacred legal obligation to give up our power, to surrender our sovereignty, to submit to the whims of our enemies, to allow our cities to descend into violent anarchy, to welcome in any foreigner from anywhere in the world who arrives at our doorstep without permission, to transform our towns into refugee camps for the entire planet.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “And beyond our borders too, they would have us believe that we must allow our rivals to act against us with impunity, that those who flood our country with drugs and crime and death should be met with little more than the occasional and polite complaint. There is nothing - there is nothing - in our history or the history of any other great nation that requires us to recognize the authority or legitimacy of any of these ridiculous ideas.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “Quite the opposite - it is not only alien to our political and legal tradition; it is alien to who we are. It is an attack on our essential character as a people, a rejection of the qualities and the instincts that have defined Americans since before the founding itself. America has always and, I believe, will always be a nation of irrepressible ambition, ambition which, since the very beginning, extended far beyond our borders. Low ceilings and small horizons were never our destiny.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “Even the American Revolution itself was driven in part by our forefathers’ anger at British limits on our westward expansion - a grievance cited in the very Declaration of Independence itself. The history of our nation and our people brims - it brims with a hunger to expand, to grow, to explore, to conquer, to stake a claim to new frontiers.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “It can be found, by the way, in the opening paragraph of the Federalist Papers, where Hamilton begins by announcing to his readers that the ratification debate would decide the fate of an empire - in many respects, the most interesting in the world. We, Americans, we are not passive, an inward-looking people. To submit to the sterile vision of radical judges or soulless global bureaucrats would be to betray who we are, to betray ourselves.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “The real America, the nation that actually exists in the text of our founding documents, that actually exists in the history of our people, in the conduct of the men who built backwater colonies into the greatest superpower on Earth, was always destined to go beyond, to be greater and stronger, more than which had come before. Our laws, our Constitution, our legal norms, and our political traditions developed because - not in spite - of that fact.”

• US State Department Press Releases, November 14: “This is the true American genius of self-government, the unique and distinctive structure of our Constitution, marrying a remarkable freedom and independence with an equally remarkable strength for collective action. It is the expression of these characteristics and instincts our institutions developed to organize and channel our ambition, not to suffocate them.”