“Yesterday, Marco had a fairly remarkable comment in that he suggested that my record was exactly like his on immigration and I have to admit, I laughed out loud at that”, Cruz told radio host Mike Gallagher. Rubio, who’s by no means averse to policy specifics, is running an aspirational and narrative-driven race, not terribly dissimilar to Barack Obama’s (successful) 2008 campaign. And both Rubio and Cruz are building very formidable and well-financed political operations.
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Cruz has not wavered from his staunchly conservative corner, and regularly denounces the establishment GOP, including party leaders in Congress.
The Rubio campaign continued the attack Thursday when spokesman Joe Pounder tweeted a link to a “FLASHBACK video” of Cruz in a Senate Judiciary Committee where the Rubio campaign says Cruz defends his amendment that gives undocumented immigrants a path to legal status, a chance for the undocumented to come “out of the shadows”. Now, a former GOP presidential nominee making a big endorsement.
Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-FL) presidential campaign brushed off repeated, yet subtle, accusations of being a moderate from Sen.
As for Ted Cruz, he went the opposite route. “So, if you look at it, I don’t think our positions are dramatically different”. In fact, the deal among all eight bipartisan authors of the bill to vote as a group to defeat troublesome amendments was well known at the time and not a secret. “It’s clear that the only way that the way to fix the broken immigration system is by first securing the border”.
Rubio and Cruz are in Orlando to speak at the Sunshine Summit. So Ted Cruz saying he opposes a path to citizenship but supports legalizing is not a tremendous difference. But Gage said that perception could readily change given Trump’s long tenure as the Republican front-runner, combined with “candidates like Ted Cruz trying to drive our party further to the right” on the immigration issue. Four candidates (Ben Carson, Cruz, Paul and Fiorina) have endorsed single-rate taxes, with Carson explicitly tying his proposal to the religious concept of tithing, though he now says the government might need more than the traditional 10 percent. It has been dealt with. By contrast, Rubio is still open to a path to legalization-albeit very long-and won’t say when he’ll end the president’s program for “DREAMers”. “And it is going to be hard to argue against that”. And Tea Party members think they can ride Cruz to a takeover of the party.
“This is not blanket amnesty”, Rubio said at the time. The suggestion, I suppose, is that Hispanics inexorably vote Democratic-a premise Cruz’s very existence seems to contradict. An expansion of legal immigration so as to obviate the enormous demand for illegal immigration?
The bill and Rubio came under heavy fire from conservatives and died in dramatic fashion in the House – and Rubio has sought to distance himself from comprehensive immigration reform since. He chided donors and reporters in Tuesday night’s debate for not seeing immigration as a pocketbook issue as opposed to a cultural one. But that unvetted group, too, is what Cruz wants to legalize.
In an interview with CNN last week, Sen. In fact, most of the audience probably did not understand that Cruz was taking a jab at Rubio when Cruz said his plan to slash the federal budget included eliminating “corporate welfare, like sugar subsidies”. And he has increasingly said that doing anything legislatively in such a major fashion would be a mistake. But since that time, Rubio has seen that comprehensive immigration reform is not politically possible.
In recent days, Rubio’s immigration position has begun to come into sharp focus, even though he was spared from the back-and-forth during the GOP presidential debate in Milwaukee earlier this week.
He said he would move to deport the recently arrived and what he described as “criminals”. They would have to wait in line behind everyone who’s applied before them. The first step is we don’t just have to pass a law that improves our ability to enforce the law. Tweeting, “The idea of tracking down and deporting 11 million people is absurd, inhumane and un-American”. Of course that’s never going to happen.
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A few on the right are still not satisfied. Thus, in large measure, the drubbing GOP candidates took among Hispanic voters in the last two elections.
