Cruz, vying for numerous same voters who cheer Donald Trump’s harsh immigration rhetoric, has cast himself as a hard-liner on immigration and declared Wednesday that “I have never supported legalization and I do not intend to support legalization”.
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“There were some that voted for it because they wanted to keep it alive and they were afraid the whole program would expire”, Rubio said of the Patriot Act’s broader surveillance powers. “That amendment called their bluff, because it revealed that the members of the Gang of Eight were hypocrites”.
Rubio spokesman Joe Pounder hit back in an e-mail to reporters on Thursday, saying that “the only one who might have gotten bluffed by Senator Cruz in 2013 was Senator Cruz in 2015”, and added that the Texas senator is “proving yet again that he will say anything for political gain”. “I do think that we will have meaningful immigration reform if he’s president”.
But Cruz’s record with the bill is a bit more complicated than outright opposition: He offered a handful of amendments that would have removed the pathway to citizenship and streamlined visa programs.
In addition, Burr admitted that he hadn’t watched the debate at all, so he wouldn’t have been able to catch Cruz’s mistake in the act.
Cruz stammered in his response, saying that “of course I wanted my amendment to pass. …” He characterized his amendment as a “poison pill”, meant to demonstrate the supporters of the overall bill were not serious about passing something that did not include a path to citizenship. In this scenario, he would have been able to cite his amendment as proof that he was fine with immigration reform in general; he just didn’t like the citizenship piece and a few other components that Democrats included… It’s “heads I win, tails you lose” logic. “He’s a champion of legal immigration, but he’s also unabashedly a champion of border security”.
But look. We’re deep, deep in the weeds now, and I think Joel Pollak is a thousand percent right about that. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). Calling his rival a “wonderful communicator” who’s “well-liked in Washington”, he repeatedly accused him of dissembling about the immigration bill, and doing so because the Tuesday debate had finally drawn him out on the Gang of Eight. Cruz recently surged to first place in the Iowa caucuses and second nationally, and Rubio has typically polled in the top three nationally. Someone as pristine as that had better be especially pristine on immigration, the ultimate litmus test nowadays for RINO status among grassroots righties.
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“His report that they only got 20 to 30 percent was publicly reported in February 2014”, Wheeler says.
