“Based On Ambition”: Marco Rubio Decides Whether He Wants To Kill Immigration Reform Or Not
The Senate has just begun the weeks-long process of debating and voting on the immigration reform bill crafted by the “gang of eight.” Harry Reid would like the bill passed on July 4, for the rather obvious symbolism. Supporters are still confident that the bill will pass the Senate.
The best thing the bill has going for it is that Mitch McConnell is going to actually allow it to come to the floor. (Minority Leader McConnell has veto power over most Senate business, because many senators have convinced themselves that the founders wanted him to.) The “gang” has four Republican members, meaning only a few more are needed in order to reach 60 votes and beat a potential filibuster. Kelly Ayotte is one Republican who’s publicly announced her support for the bill.
That assumes, obviously, that all Democrats and all the Republican members of the “gang” vote for their own bill, which might not happen. In fact “gang” member Marco Rubio has threatened to vote against the bill unless it includes “tougher” border security. And amending the bill so that Democrats no longer want to vote for it is one of the Senate anti-reform bloc’s strategies for defeating the bill. Rubio has begun signalling that he supports such an amendment, by Senator John Cornyn, that would increase surveillance and enforcement at the border. More importantly, it would prevent the “trigger” point at which immigrants can apply for green cards, and then citizenship, from happening until a series of incredibly unreasonable security standards are met, including “90 percent of illegal border crossers” apprehended and “100 percent border surveillance, or situational awareness, of each one-mile segment of the Southern border.”
(In Bush’s second term, Cornyn made similar proposals, and then decided not to support reform after all, surprise surprise.)
Meanwhile, Ted Cruz, a right-wing populist Senate newcomer who may want to be president, just like Senator Rubio, has, unlike Rubio, won himself a great deal of conservative affection by declaring himself immigration reform’s greatest enemy in the Senate. In explaining his opposition to Yahoo, Cruz sums up the right-wing argument: If immigration reform fails, Democrats will be to blame, because they insisted that immigration reform actually do something about immigrants:
“The biggest obstacle to passing common sense immigration reform is President Barack Obama,” Cruz tells The Fine Print, going on to say that the White House’s “insistence” on including a path to citizenship is standing in the way of the bill’s ultimate passage.
Cruz has not “ruled out” a filibuster, which means he will filibuster. But then everyone already assumed the bill would require 60 votes to pass.
This is Rubio’s problem: It’s hard to see the GOP changing so much by 2016 that having been essential in passing immigration reform won’t be seen by many conservative activists as a massive liability. Rubio had a “pass” from conservative media figures like Rush Limbaugh to work on this stuff before, because everyone sort of “agreed” immigration reform was necessary. The further we get from November 2012, though, the less urgent it seems, and the nativist factions are reasserting themselves. Mark Krikorian in the National Review and Mickey Kaus at the Daily Caller are trashing Rubio almost every day. This Powerline post is a good example of the sort of press he’s increasingly getting. Rubio is now supporting amendments demanding incredibly strict border enforcement before the “path to citizenship” can begin. This is what conservatives want. The Powerline guy’s headline is “MARCO RUBIO’S LATEST FIG LEAF.” The problem, you see, is that Rubio’s proposed security amendments will rely on the government to enforce them, and you can’t trust the government. There’s not really any pleasing these guys, except, of course, with a bill that provides no path to citizenship at all — which is the Cruz approach.
The calculation now, for Rubio, is a bit complicated. If it looks like something close to the Senate bill can pass the House with Republican support, Rubio is no longer the sole conservative responsible for it happening. He escapes blame. If the Senate bill passes with Rubio’s support and then Boehner decides to get the bill through the House with Democratic votes, Rubio will be branded a traitor to the conservative cause for the rest of eternity. If it passes the Senate and dies in the House, Rubio stuck his neck out for nothing.
When Rubio met behind closed doors with some of the most conservative members of the House, he was less trying to sell the bill than he was getting a feel for the room. As the National Review’s Jonathan Strong says:
Opponents and advocates estimate that 10 to 20 Republican senators are on the fence. Politics, as much as policy, is driving their final calculus. What they need isn’t always some specific change but rather, as one top Republican described it, a “secret sauce” of political cover.
Rubio’s argument is that he’s working to make the bill conservative enough to pass. But aligning himself with people like Cornyn, whose goal is to make the bill totally unpalatable to Democrats, suggests that he’d be fine with simply making the bill unpassable. And right now prospects in the House look grim. Last week, Republicans passed a bill designed to force the administration to deport “Dream” immigrants — people who’ve done well in school or in the armed forces since arriving here as children. Former House “gang” affiliate Raul Labrador quit the group. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, whose committee will have to approve the bill before it reaches the House floor, doesn’t want a comprehensive bill. He wants a series of smaller, stand-alone bills that will allow Republicans to vote for more border security without also voting for “amnesty.” Few Republican members of the House have any personal political incentive to moderate on immigration: Most of their seats are safe.
And in 2014, and 2016, conservative voters won’t be thinking of the long-term demographic health of the Republican party. They’ll just be asking whether Republicans worked with or against this reviled administration. Rubio knows this. His decision to become a key player on immigration was based on his ambition, not any particular principled concern for the undocumented. His ambition will continue to determine his course of action.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, June 10, 2013
“A Finger In The Eye Of Hispanic Voters”: House GOP Dream Act Deferral Vote Is Political Insanity
Honestly, when I saw that House Republicans had passed an amendment today which would defund President Obama’s limited, executive-order-driven Dream Act, my first thought was to wonder what the GOP is thinking. Does this party have a death wish?
This isn’t the political equivalent of rocket science. Hispanics voted overwhelmingly to support Obama last year. And given demographic trends regarding the share of the electorate they’re going to make up in coming years, neither party can afford to become noncompetitive with these voters. It’s a matter of political survival. And many Republicans know this – see the Republican National Committee’s 2012 post-mortem, for example, or the College Republicans’ recent version.
Immigration is not the number one issue for Hispanic voters, but it is a gateway issue and one that gets to tone and outlook. If voters think a party is hostile to and/or distrustful of them, they’re going to tune that party out. So rational Republicans (not to mention a whole lot of their corporate backers) want to get immigration reform done.
But today’s GOP – especially its House denizens – aren’t about rationality. So they cast the vote they did today. And it’s not an isolated occurrence. The Atlantic’s Garance Franke-Ruta looks at how the GOP is trying to blow its 2016 chances:
House Republicans walking away from comprehensive immigration reform. Tying a path to citizenship to continued second-class standing on access to health insurance. Voting to resume deporting undocumented immigrants brought here as children, a year after President Obama issued an executive order instructing the Department of Homeland Security to use discretion and make such deportations a low priority.
And this isn’t simply bad policy or stumbling into bad politics. This is going out of their way to charge into bad politics. It’s not like there’s any chance this amendment becomes law. So why make a point of voting for it?
I was at a press breakfast yesterday with Rep. Tom Price, the Georgia Republican who is vice chairman of the House Budget Committee, and he was asked about whether the GOP would suffer politically if it is blamed for killing immigration reform this year. Price, who favors the House GOP’s official approach of going piecemeal on immigration reform rather than trying to tackle it comprehensively, made a couple of enlightening comments.
First, he said that “I think what the American people want is to see individuals working to solve challenges.” I tend to think that what the American people actually want is to see their elected representatives actually solving challenges rather than simply trying – this isn’t kindergarten: You don’t get points for trying really hard; you get points for getting stuff done.
The second thing he said was that legislation with a path to citizenship or a path to legal status wouldn’t pass the House with a majority of Republican votes because the GOP doesn’t trust “the administration to enforce the current laws that are on the books as they relate to much of immigration.” But he then went on to conflate the views of his party and its base with the broader electorate: “The American people don’t trust Washington in this area because the promise that was made in 1986 has been broken,” he said, referring to the deal President Ronald Reagan signed which provided amnesty for illegal immigrants back then in exchange for promises of border security. “There’s no trust at all. The first step in regaining that trust is living up to the promise that was made to the nation back in 1986 and that is controlling and securing the border.”
Two points. First, the border is far more secure than it has been. Second, if mistrust of Washington was as widespread as Price seems to suppose, polls would show deep opposition to both comprehensive immigration reform and a way for currently illegal immigrants to gain citizenship, but poll after poll shows otherwise. A recent poll conducted for Bloomberg showed that 74 percent of adults favor “Allowing immigrants living in the country illegally to become citizens, provided they don’t have criminal records, they pay fines and back taxes, and they wait more than 10 years.” That’s hardly angry mistrust of Washington regarding immigration.
The problem is that House Republicans either confuse their base’s wishes or simply don’t want to cross them. Either way, they’re voting themselves a path to oblivion.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, June 7, 2013
“The Slow Down Caucus”: On Immigration Reform, Marco Rubio Is Building Himself An Escape Hatch
Even as the Sunday shows were alive with predictions that a deal is close on immigration reform, Marco Rubio took the occasion to cast doubt on the prospects for success by joining other Senators who are calling for the process to slow down:
“We will need a healthy public debate that includes committee hearings and the opportunity for other senators to improve our legislation with their own amendments,” he said on Sunday. “Excessive haste in the pursuit of a lasting solution is perhaps even more dangerous to the goals many of us share,” he said on Saturday.
As my Post colleague Evan Soltas points out, Rubio has effectively built himself a “very clear escape hatch” on immigration. If he needs to bail, he’s got his excuse: The process was rushed, or Democrats were unfair procedurally to Republicans.
By my count this is the third such escape hatch Rubio has created for himself. The first came when word leaked that the White House had drawn up its own plan that was marginally different from what pro-reform Republicans want. Rubio said this had threatened the prospects for success, even though his plan was very similar to the President’s. But then John McCain and Lindsey Graham publicly proclaimed their belief in Obama’s sincere desire to make the process work. The second came back when Rubio claimed that unions were putting reform in peril because of their dispute with business groups over the guest worker program. But now that dispute has mostly been resolved.
Now, escape hatch number three is to join the “slow down” caucus. Only in so doing, Rubio is joining with other Senators who are urging a go-slow approach, such as Ted Cruz and Jeff Sessions, who may be urging a slowdown so the armies of the right have time to mobilize and strike fear into any reform-minded Republican officials, killing reform.
Indeed, one group opposed to reform has explicitly called on Senators to slow the process down, apparently for the purposes of derailing it. And we’ve seen this before: back in 2007, opponents of reform similarly tried to slow the process, with Senator John Cornyn urging colleagues to “slow down and read this bill” because Americans had not yet digested the plan. Now, six years later, we’re again hearing the calls to “slow down.” But the American people have made their verdict clear: They want a path to citizenship.
No doubt Rubio has a very tough balancing act to strike. He needs to reassure conservatives that he’s prepared to walk away from any deal, and that he’s getting them everything he can in the process. If he does this successfully, it could potentially bring some of them along. But as Benjy Sarlin points out, Senate Democrats have already vowed not to procedurally rush the process and have promised to run things through the typical committee and amendment process. Lending aid and comfort to the “slow down” caucus could make things worse, given that their apparent aim is to allow opponents more time to kill reform.
By: Greg Sargent, The Washington Post, The Plum Line, April 1, 2013
“Acrobatic Mispositioning”: Jeb Bush’s Latest Bold Or Bold-Faced Gambit
You have to admire, in a sick sort of way, any politician that gets caught mispositioning him- or herself on a major issue and then just quickly flip-flops and denies it. Mitt Romney, to the surprise of many of us, managed this maneuver (denouncing Obamacare and then denying any contradiction with his own authorship of the state health reform initiative it was based upon) for two solid years.
Can Jeb Bush do the same with the immigration issue? He’s sure trying, as explained by TPM’s Benjy Sarlin:
Jeb Bush completed a whirlwind one-week journey on immigration on Sunday, praising a Senate proposal to grant eventual citizenship for undocumented immigrants after attacking the idea in a newly released book he co-authored that was itself a reversal of his past position.
To make a long story short, Bush’s new book (written near the savage end of the period of nativist domination of the GOP that began in reaction to his brother’s comprehensive reform initiative and extended throughout the 2012 presidential nominating process) flatly eschewed a “path to citizenship” for those who had earlier entered the country illegally in favor of a vast “guest worker” program that would legitimize most of the undocumented without granting them citizenship, thus avoiding the twin perils of “amnesty” and of cattle cars transporting millions of women and children to the border. Now Jeb’s claiming this carefully calibrated positioning was just a psychological ploy to lure angry wingnuts onto the paths of righteousness:
On CBS’ “Face The Nation,” Bush downplays the inconsistency between his book’s tough criticism of a path to citizenship and his apparent support for a Senate plan that includes exactly that.
“Well first of all, I haven’t changed,” Bush says. “The book was written to try to create a blueprint for conservatives that were reluctant to embrace comprehensive reform, to give them perhaps a set of views that they could embrace. I support a path to legalization or citizenship so long as the path for people that have been waiting patiently is easier and costs less — the legal entrance to our country — than illegal entrance.”
Yes, that’s right: Bush is not only (a) denying he changed his position, and (b) suggesting he was just acting as a shepherd to the wayward nativist sheep, but is (c) trying to take credit for the recent reemergence of comprehensive immigration reform as an acceptable conservative policy goal. That’s some serious chutzpah, folks.
The Romney analogy is apropos in another sense: before it became ideologically toxic, Romneycare was Mitt’s calling card, his example of successful conservative policymaking on an issue that had long been “owned” by Democrats. Much of Jeb Bush’s appeal (beyond the general belief that he was the most genuinely conservative pol in his family) as a potential presidential candidacy came from his theoretical appeal to Latino voters as someone married to a Mexican-American (his kids were the ones famously referred to by his father as the “little brown ones”) who also had close ties to Florida’s Cuban-American community. His brother, after all, had championed a “path to citizenship,” and he was generally regarded as Marco Rubio’s political patron. By choosing to publish an entire book on immigration reform at the very beginning of a new presidential cycle, Jeb drew a great deal of attention to his background on the issue, and thus had nowhere to hide when it turned out he had guessed wrong on where his party was headed on this subject.
So like Romney before him, he seems to have decided to just brazen it out, hoping his acrobatic changes of position become yesterday’s news if he decides to run for president. It more or less worked for Mitt–at least in securing the GOP nomination–but if Jeb does want to run, he cannot be so assured that he will face the kind of clownish intra-party competition that was so crucial to Romney’s nomination campaign. It would be particularly ironic if Jeb were to be pushed aside by his former protege Rubio as someone with greater credibility in both Tea Party and “pragmatic conservative” circles. But that could happen. George W. Bush’s “smarter brother” may have just out-smarted himself.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, March 11, 2013
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