"It's a trillion dollars in spending and I think earlier this week he talked about having some activity and then wasn't here,” Rand Paul said. | AP Photo Paul: Rubio should resign over missed Senate votes

Rand Paul swung hard at Marco Rubio on Friday, calling on his fellow senator and Republican presidential candidate to resign from his Senate seat for continuing to skip out on Senate votes.

Paul, as well as fellow presidential contenders Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham and Bernie Sanders all showed up to vote on a massive $1.8 trillion spending and tax package on Friday. Rubio was absent; he is scheduled to campaign in Iowa and Missouri.


"It's a trillion dollars in spending and I think earlier this week he talked about having some activity and then wasn't here,” Paul told POLITICO. “So yeah I think it's important to show up to your job. I think that really he ought to resign or quit accepting his pay if he's not going to come to work.”

Paul voted against the measure. Alex Conant, a spokesman for Rubio's presidential campaign, responded: "Votes like Friday's are why Marco is running for president." The Florida senator would have voted against the spending and tax package, his office said.

"Leaders in Washington crafted this trillion dollar spending bill in secret, and unveiled it during the debate on Tuesday night. Marco had barely 48 hours to review over 2,000 pages of spending," Conant said. "Marco has consistently voted against those sorts of bills, but the truth is that it's not going to change until we elect a new president. That's why Marco is meeting voters in Iowa today."

Overall this year, Paul has had a much better attendance record than Rubio. According to GovTrack.us data, Paul has missed 6 percent of votes since the beginning of the year, while Rubio has missed about 35 percent of votes.

Later Friday Rubio attacked Rand for running for two offices at once: His Senate seat and the presidency. Rubio is not running for reelection to the Senate next year.

"He's the only person running who likes politics so much, he's running for two offices at the same time. I mean he wants to be a senator and president," Rubio told CBS. "I'm not running for reelection to the Senate, because I want to be president.

Rubio briefly floated a threat to slow down the passage of the omnibus measure earlier this week, saying during an interview on Fox News: “If they’ve got [a] sufficient number of votes at the end, they can always ram it down our throat, but I think if we can add some days to it, the way Sen. [Jeff] Sessions is talking about and maybe some others, that process of slowing it down allows more Americans to wake up to the reality of what’s in the bill.”

But Rubio — or any of the other 99 senators — didn't object to moving up a series of votes to pass the sweeping package to Friday morning. When asked about Rubio's absence at Friday's votes, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declined to comment, noting his policy of not weighing in on the 2016 presidential race.

"Washington's leadership has created another massive spending bill in secret and rammed it through Congress, hoping that the American people don't notice or have become numb to this kind of business as usual. This is what a broken Washington looks like under President Obama and what Congress reverts to without conservative presidential leadership,” Rubio said in a statement. “While stopping ObamaCare's taxpayer-funded bailout of insurance companies is an important win, I strongly oppose this bill because it keeps spending money that we don't have, grows our debt, and concedes far too many of President Obama's and liberal Democrats' big government spending priorities."