“It feels like we’ve gone back in a time machine, ignoring everything that’s happened,” he said.
The flare-ups on the right have put Rubio on the front lines facing a GOP base that until now has seen him as a hero for conservative causes.
In a speech in Las Vegas, President Obama described guidelines for immigration reform a day after a group of senators made their own proposal. White House correspondent David Nakamura discusses the timing of the announcements and the prospects for a deal.
More from PostPolitics
NSA head: Surveillance helped thwart more than 50 terror plots
Alexander lays out new details about how the surveillance efforts helped thwart terror events.
Boehner: No immigration bill without majority GOP support
The speaker apparently seeks to stave off a threatened rules change by a renegade group of his colleagues.
Why Joe Biden is talking about guns
THE FIX | Why is the vice president is talking about guns? Four reasons taken together could explain it.
The National Review — which featured Rubio, then a dark-horse Senate candidate, on its cover in 2009, boosting his stature in the conservative movement — singled him out for criticism in a Wednesday editorial, calling him “wrong about how to go about repairing our immigration system.” The editorial is headlined “A Pointless Amnesty.” A fellow Republican senator, David Vitter of Louisiana, described Rubio on a radio show as “amazingly naive” on the issue of immigration reform.
Rubio has tried to coax conservatives along by assuring them that any deal would include strict conditions and enforcement requirements.
“If there is not language in this bill that guarantees that nothing else will happen unless these enforcement mechanisms are in place, I won’t support it,” he told talk radio host Rush Limbaugh this week.
Writing this week on the conservative Web site Red State, which criticized the bipartisan Senate plan, Rubio said conservatives had secured “important concessions” from Democrats, such as the border security contingency for citizenship and a program to verify that employers are hiring legal workers.
Rubio’s presence in the talks gives cover to skeptical Republicans. But Republicans could face a dilemma if Obama and congressional Democrats reject the contingencies and force them to vote on a more direct citizenship path.
The citizenship question has “always been the hardest needle to thread on this issue,” said a senior GOP House aide, requesting anonymity to discuss internal thinking. “If the bipartisan Senate group thinks they’ve found a way to thread that needle, then the White House needs to be very careful not to screw it up.”
Another ominous sign for backers of the citizenship path is the response in recent days of Rep. Raúl R. Labrador, an Idaho Republican and Puerto Rico native who was elected with tea party support and has been seen by immigration advocates as a possible bridge to House conservatives. Labrador, a former immigration lawyer, said in an interview that a citizenship plan would be “difficult for the House to accept.”
He called a potential Republican willingness to accept legal residency for illegal immigrants a “huge shift” and said Democrats will need to similarly back off a demand for citizenship.
Loading...
Comments