“Marco Rubio, Leader Of The Pack”: The Best Way To Stop A Lynch Mob Is To Lead It
It really is amazing the extent to which partisan and ideological predispositions can affect how one interprets the same data. I look at Marco Rubio’s behavior on the immigration issue over the last sixteen months and see an unusually shameless flip-flop by a man willing to do almost anything to become president. Byron York looks at the same behavior, and even acknowledges the remarkable extent of self-contradiction going on; yet he purports to see Rubio as a brave and realistic pro-immigration-reform leader who is executing a “course correction” because he understands “the people” need some good vicious border enforcement before they’ll calm down enough to accept the mass legalization, a.k.a. “amnesty,” that conservative activists are sworn to oppose to the very last ditch.
This strikes me as the equivalent of saying the best way to stop a lynch mob is to lead it, but I’d guess York and I would probably agree that there is something of a mob mentality among “the base” on immigration policy these days–a sense of grassroots rage being liberated from the pragmatic designs of calculating pols. And that’s a real problem for those Republican pols, as Jonathan Chait astutely points out today. There’s now no gathering of GOP presidential wannabes with the grassroots conservative activists who will largely determine their fate where DREAMers won’t show up and make things very, very uncomfortable:
The trouble for Republicans is that the political theater created by the Dreamers is not going to stop. They can try their best to control officially sanctioned media debates, but the Dreamers are staging debates without permission, endlessly highlighting the cruelty of the Republican stance. It is a strategy for which the Republicans so far have no answer.
Now you have to figure that Frank Luntz or somebody will come up with a script the pols can use to defuse confrontations with DREAMers in a way that sounds less Steve Kingish. But it’s real hard to train “the base” to behave itself as well. In the famous King/Paul video, what impressed me most were the fundraiser attendees who were chanting “Go Home!” as King ranted at the DREAMers about “your country” (Mexico) being lawless. And at the instantly famous Rubio event in SC earlier this week, Rubio was being egged on by what appeared to be a roomful of angry hooting nativists.
So you can rationalize Rubio’s behavior (and that of similarly shrill GOP pols) all you want, and suggest he’s being a leader on immigration. But at best he’s the leader of a howling pack, with no real control over its future direction.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, August 27, 2014
“Rubio vs. Rubio On Immigration Reform”: His New Line Is The GOP Should Get 100% Of What It Wants Now, And Later
Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-Fla.) has a challenge for which there is no obvious answer. He helped write a popular, bipartisan immigration-reform bill, which his party’s base hates with the heat of a thousand suns. If the conservative Floridian abandons his own legislation, he looks craven and cowardly. If the senator stands by his work, the Republican base will reject him.
And so Rubio is left trying to distance himself from his own bill in a way that doesn’t make him look ridiculous. As we were reminded yesterday, it’s easier said than done.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) on Sunday said Congress “will never have the votes” for a comprehensive immigration bill without first addressing border security, urging a step-by-step approach to the issue.
“We will never have the votes necessary to pass a one, in one bill, all of those things,” said Rubio on “Fox News Sunday” about border security, a path to legalization and an overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws. “It just won’t happen.”
What’s wrong with this? Well, everything.
First, the whole point of comprehensive immigration reform, which Rubio championed as recently as last year, is to create a compromise framework that both parties could embrace: Republicans get increased border security; Democrats get a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who are already in the United States. Rubio’s new line is that the GOP should get 100% of what it wants now, and later, Republicans will think about Democratic priorities.
In other words, the senator has gone from endorsing a bipartisan compromise to endorsing a policy in which his party gets everything it wants in exchange for nothing but the promise of possible action at some point in the future.
Second, while Rubio 2013 believed Congress can and should pass his bipartisan legislation, Rubio 2014 insists his bill “just won’t happen” because “we will never have the votes.” But this too is at odds with what we know – by many estimates, if the House Republican leadership brought comprehensive immigration reform to the floor, it would pass. That assessment is shared by many from the left, right, and center, which is why GOP leaders refuse to allow the House to work its will.
When Rubio says the votes aren’t there, he arguably has it backwards – the bill passed the Senate easily, and would likely fare just as well in the House if given a chance.
As for the Florida Republican inching away from his own positions, Rubio remains in an awkward spot.
“Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace on Sunday challenged Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) to explain why he pulled his support for the Senate bipartisan immigration reform bill.
Wallace displayed polls showing Rubio’s favorability taking a hit since supporting the bill. “Is that why you have now switched and said we have to do this in stages with enforcement first and any dealing with legality or citizenship for the immigrants way down the line and afterward?” Wallace asked.
Rubio said his stance on immigration reform has nothing to do with politics.
Perish the thought.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 4, 2014
“Lazy, Incompetent And Irresponsible”: The House GOP’s Underwhelming Response To A Crisis
Three weeks ago, President Obama presented a pretty credible solution to the humanitarian crisis at the U.S./Mexico border. The White House requested $3.7 billion in emergency funding that would build detention centers, add immigration judges, and beef up border security, all while expediting deportations to discourage an additional influx.
A week later, asked if his chamber would approve Obama’s plan, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) told reporters, “I would certainly hope so,” though he cautioned against optimism.
My Grand Unified Theory of Boehner has long held that the Speaker’s political instincts are fairly sound, but he invariably has to take a less reasonable course because his radicalized caucus will tolerate nothing else. In the case of the border crisis, Boehner wanted to approve Obama’s proposed solution, but House Republicans ruled out the possibility, and with two days remaining before Congress takes a five-week break, they finally came up with a counter-offer.
Republicans hope to pass $659 million in supplemental spending for the border crisis before leaving for the August recess, Speaker John A. Boehner said after a GOP conference meeting Tuesday.
The Ohio Republican said the House will “attempt to move this bill” on Thursday and that he anticipated the measure would have “sufficient support,” but that there was still “a little more work to do to” to shore up the votes.
This is not a bill anyone should take pride in. After complaining literally for months about this crisis, the fact that this proposal is the best the House GOP could come up with is pretty powerful evidence to bolster the post-policy thesis.
To address the crisis, the White House wants to spend nearly $4 billion, while Senate Democrats are writing a related package that would spend nearly $3 billion. House Republicans, meanwhile, want to spend $659 million – about a fifth of the original total eyed by the Obama administration – two-thirds of which would go to border security.
Apparently, no one told the GOP lawmakers that the current crisis doesn’t really have anything to do with border security. That, or lawmakers were told, but they didn’t care.
Making matters just a little more absurd, the House bill will run through Sept. 30. In other words, it’s a bill to tackle the problem for the next two months, at which point Congress would have to start over.
Why can’t the House GOP pass a real legislative response to the crisis they claim to take seriously? It gets back to something we talked about last week.
There is a group of far-right lawmakers in the House who don’t want to approve anything, in part because they don’t want to address the problem and in part because if the lower chamber does pass a bill, it might lead to a compromise with the Senate,
And House Republicans really don’t like compromises.
It led Boehner to pursue a bizarre strategy, in which he demanded that the White House urge House Democrats to support a Republican bill, since the Speaker couldn’t round up enough GOP support on his own. Dems, not surprisingly, balked.
Which in turn led Republicans to create an even worse proposal, intended to please far-right members, who wouldn’t support anything else.
So what happens now? The House will try to pass this weak bill before leaving town. As best as I can tell, there are no reliable headcounts yet, and it remains a distinct possibility that the GOP-led chamber will defeat the GOP-written bill.
If, however, the House manages to pass its measure, it would need support from the Senate and White House, which would have to decide fairly quickly whether the bill is better or worse than nothing. In theory, the Senate would approve its alternative and the two chambers would work on a possible compromise, but with lawmakers ready to leave town in a couple of days for a month off, there simply isn’t time.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 29, 2014
“Marco Rubio’s Unique Take On History”: Way, Way, Way Back To The Future
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) generated quite a few headlines in his interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep this week, but not necessarily for the right reasons.
The story that got tongues wagging inside the Beltway was hard to miss: the conservative senator dismissed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s presidential future, arguing the nation is at a “generational, transformational crossroads,” and Clinton is “a 20th century candidate.”
Maybe it’s just me, but hearing a far-right lawmaker who opposes marriage equality, supports limits on contraception access, opposes reproductive rights, balks at ENDA, and fails to believe in climate science turn around and present himself as a forward-thinking leader for the future is a bit much. As Barbara Morrill joked, Rubio’s “the guy for a generational, transformational change. Assuming you’re talking about a transformation back to the 19th century.”
But just as interesting were the senator’s comments about comprehensive immigration reform, which Rubio co-sponsored in the Senate, which passed a bill fairly easily last year.
“I’ve been through this now, I was involved in the effort. I warned during that effort that I didn’t think it did enough on this first element, the [border] security front. I was proven, unfortunately, right by the fact that it didn’t move in the House.”
As the senator probably knows, this assessment doesn’t line up especially well with what’s actually transpired.
As Rubio now sees it, immigration reform died because the Senate bill – which is to say, Rubio’s bill – came up short on border security. We know this is wrong. To shore up GOP support in the upper chamber, the bill’s bipartisan sponsors agreed to a “border surge” that would nearly double the “current border patrol force to 40,000 agents from 21,000, as well as for the completion of 700 miles of fence on the nation’s southern border.”
It took border security so seriously that some reform proponents wavered, fearing it went too far in militarizing the border. One GOP senator conceded at the time that the legislation went so far on the security front that it was “almost overkill.”
Rubio now says he was right all along, warning senators that the bill wasn’t tough enough. But that’s plainly silly. Indeed, as Simon Maloy discovered, Rubio actually praised his bill’s security provisions at the time, boasting that it “mandates the most ambitious border and interior security measures in our nation’s history.”
So why did the House Republicans kill it anyway? Because the comprehensive solution required them to compromise, accepting a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants already in the United States. House GOP lawmakers refused to strike a deal – hell, they refused to even go to the negotiating table – so the legislation died, again.
The related question is, why would Rubio make such obviously untrue claims now? The answer, I suspect, is that the Florida Republican took a sharp hit from his party’s far-right base for supporting immigration reform, and as Rubio looks ahead to the 2016 race, the senator needs a way to distance himself from his own legislative handiwork.
This, apparently, is the argument he’s come up with. If you’re thinking the talking points aren’t going to persuade anyone, you’re not alone.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 23, 2014
“Who Are We, Anyway?”: A Moral Issue Of How We Choose To Define Ourselves As A Country
Something extraordinary is happening at our southern border. Thousands of children, most unaccompanied by adult relatives, are crossing from Mexico and immediately turning themselves in to the Border Patrol. They come principally from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.
What must be going on in those countries that impels their most precious legacy, their children, to make such a journey? What are we, as a nation, going to do about it?
Reports from Central America center on two issues: poverty and gang violence. Poverty in that region is not new, nor has it ever been the stimulus for a mass migration of children. Gang violence has increased, driven in part by the trade in illegal drugs and perhaps by some success in Mexico in confronting drug gangs.
The more important question is what we’re going to do about it? Texas Governor Perry advocates a military response, perhaps by the National Guard. What exactly does he anticipate that the National Guard would do? Are they supposed to shoot at children as they cross a bridge or a river? Doesn’t sound right to me.
The Administration’s response to the problem is financial and legal. Appropriate 3.7 billion dollars to house these children until their cases can be heard by a (hopefully more efficient) adjudication process to determine whether each child is legitimately a refugee. But there aren’t lawyers to represent most of these children, so the legal process is likely to be a farce.
Some in Congress want to change the applicable laws to make it easier to expel these children without a legal process. I suppose such a course might relieve the government of some costs, but does such a policy square with our values?
The arrival of large numbers of children on our doorstep is not a physical menace to us. Nor is it an unsustainable financial burden. It is not a legal or bureaucratic matter either. Instead, it is a moral issue of how we choose to define ourselves as a country.
We need to move these children out of mass holding pens and into homes of people who will care for them and raise them. Then we can let the legal process grind away.
By: Joseph B. Kadane, Leonard J. Savage University Professor of Statistics and Social Sciences, Emeritus, at Carnegie Mellon University; The Huffington Post Blog, July 17, 2014
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