Florida Senator Marco Rubio and Texas Senator Ted Cruz faced off in a debate over metadata on December 15 at the Republican presidential debate in Las Vegas.
Advertisement
“He supports legalization, and I think his hope was once he got into the general election, to then start talking about legalization as a way to attract more voters”, Rubio said.
In Iowa, meanwhile, Rubio accused Cruz of trying to duck the issue – pointing to his amendment that would have replaced citizenship with legal status for undocumented immigrants. Rand Paul who had his best debate performance yet. The evangelical leaders voted four times, all of which bore the same result-Cruz winning the majority vote but not the 75 percent “supermajority” vote the group earlier set as criteria for endorsement, the National Review said.
“But what’s so interesting is what it led to today”, he continued. Rubio later backtracked from the bill, which would have given illegal immigrants a pathway to citizenship, after it was clear it wouldn’t pass Congress. He later said immigration reform should be done in piecemeal instead of a broad bill like the 2013 proposal. But look, we need strong people. You’ve been out there on the campaign trail. This ranks third, behind the Fox News Channel debate in August (6.64 million demo viewers) and the first CNN debate, in September (5.98 million).
MCCAMMON: Well, arguably, he hasn’t been that visible.
Area Republicans have once again deemed Ted Cruz a debate victor. He jumped to first in Iowa in the venerable Des Moines register poll.
“There’s something creepy about the way Ted Cruz is pandering to Donald Trump”, the paper wrote.
“Securing our borders and stopping illegal immigration is a matter of national security”. Cruz joined with other conservatives to defeat it.
“Now we’ve seen what happened in San Bernardino”.
Senator Cruz said at one point as the two sparred, “What he knows is that the old program covered 20 to 30 per cent of phone numbers to search for terrorists”. Rubio and Cruz do have similar resumes. The desire to win and hold power is one thing the party’s hopelessly disparate factions agree on; staunch and sometimes blind opposition to President Obama and the Democrats is another.
But Rubio has to be careful how he does that. Well, that’s fine, but you have to have something to do that with.
The Florida senator was not only an author of the controversial bill, but also waged a dedicated public relations campaign to sell it to conservative media outlets. He said he’d carpet bomb ISIS.
Arizona senator John McCain, who co-authored the Senate immigration bill with Rubio, said his impression was that Cruz’s posturing did indeed amount to a flip-flop. But that’s not what he said at the time.
Advertisement
“Well, I think if you’re in favor of World War Three, you have your candidate”. I asked about the back and forth, and they said there’s too much of that.
