Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Ted Cruz (Texas) have jumped to second place, with 12 percent apiece in the new poll, followed closely by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie at 11 percent and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush at 10 percent. Rubio replied by pointing out that Cruz once supported an amendment to that bill that would have given these immigrations legal status instead of citizenship. “I don’t think there’s any question that both Rubio and Cruz have been for a form of amnesty”.
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Indeed, among the Republican Party’s two Hispanic presidential hopefuls, few issues offer a clearer contrast in tone, if not policy.
“If your eyes are glazing over like mine, this is what it’s like to be on the floor of the United States Senate”, Christie said of the bantering among Rubio, Cruz and Paul. “It’s not an attack”.
“This is a time where there is poisonous speech in national politics, Mr. Trump in particular”, Mayor Charlie Hales said, “and where we need to stand on behalf of the values that this city loves”. He’s not going to “win” the debate over this amendment for the same reason that Rubio’s not really going to “win” it either – it’s too esoteric for anyone apart from political junkies to care about it. I watched the clip below trying to imagine how a low-information voter would process what Cruz is saying and all I could come up with was “What the hell are they talking about?”. And on Friday, his campaign received a fresh surrogate in Ken Cuccinelli, the head of the Senate Conservatives Fund, a Washington pressure group despised by Senate leadership for looking to replace Republican incumbents.
Flake said Rubio’s salesmanship and work on the 2013 bill was crucial to steering the bill through the Senate-it passed 68 to 32 in June 2013. “He strongly supported legalizing people that were in this country illegally”. “Now two years later, I think the Rubio campaign, they wish they hadn’t made that choice”. Ted Cruz on Thursday over Cruz’s battle with Florida Sen.
Criticizing Rubio for his role in that gang has become a part of Cruz’s strategy.
Cruz did tell the Tribune that his legalization amendment was a poison pill in “intent and effect” with respect to a path to citizenship, but read those quotes again. “He’s the one that, for example, supports doubling the number of green cards”.
“Indeed, I led the fight against his legalization and amnesty”, Cruz declared, affirming his opposition to Rubio’s bill. Rubio would lose SC even if all the other candidates but Trump and Cruz dropped out. “One of his amendments was to block citizenship, and he did it just to block citizenship for anybody who entered the country illegally, which I think was exactly right”. “Rubio – have always felt that if you are going to be here for 20 years then you ought to have the rights and responsibilities that come with citizenship”, Sen.
Although city leaders clearly took aim at Trump, the City Council softened its position to make sure city staff did not run afoul of state elections law by politically advocating against the 2016 Republican frontrunner.
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Cruz has previously supported broadening legal immigration in some cases. “[The amendment] didn’t fix everything in the bill and I of course voted for it and so did he and he’s spoken for it and he’s sort of teased or mocked the other side by saying that, ‘Well, you say you want your immigration you can have your immigration, but you give us citizenship”, Sessions said.
