Cruz hits Rubio on immigration, but fudges his own record
When Marco Rubio ran away from the 2013 immigration reform bill he had helped pass through the Senate, it was the fear of moments like the one he experienced Tuesday night that was haunting him.
Rubio foresaw two years ago the kind of attacks on him that materialized on a debate stage in Las Vegas in front of millions of Americans. A hard-line conservative presidential candidate, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, ripped into Rubio for his efforts to solve the problem of illegal immigration, seeking to undermine Rubio’s standing with the Republican grassroots voters who will crown a nominee in just a few months.
Cruz cast Rubio as working in cahoots with President Obama and congressional Democrats and accused him of supporting “amnesty,” a catch-all and virtually meaningless term that has been used as a weapon by anti-immigration forces for years to subvert any attempt at reform.
“You know there was a time for choosing, as Reagan put it, where there was a battle over amnesty,” Cruz said. “And some chose, like Senator Rubio, to stand with Barack Obama and Chuck Schumer and support a massive amnesty plan.”
“Others chose to stand with Jeff Sessions and Steve King and the American people, and secure the border,” Cruz added, name-checking the two fiercest opponents of immigration in Congress. Sessions, a Republican U.S. senator from Alabama, has led the fight against immigration reform in the Senate. King, a Republican congressman from Iowa, has long been known as a provocative and inflammatory figure who once derisively described immigrants as having “calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.”
Cruz also hit linked Rubio’s reform effort in 2013 to the debate over refugees from Syria and the Middle East right now. Rubio responded defensively that “in 2013, we had never faced a crisis like the Syrian refugee crisis now.”
But Rubio’s most vigorous defense was to try to refocus the debate on Cruz’s own past positions. “I’m always puzzled by his attack on this issue. Ted, you support legalizing people who are in this country illegally,” Rubio said.
Cruz said the statement was “not accurate” and continued to insist that he “led the fight” against a reform bill that, despite his efforts, passed the Senate in 2013.
“For Marco to suggest our record is the same is like suggesting the fireman and the arsonist have the same record because they’re both at the scene of the fire. He was fighting to grant amnesty and not to secure the border. I was fighting to secure the border,” Cruz said.
But Rubio pressed Cruz on his past positions, keying in on the fact that Cruz did in fact introduce an amendment to the bill that would have allowed immigrants who were in the United States illegally to stay and to obtain permanent legal status.
“Does Ted Cruz support legalizing people that are in this country illegally?” Rubio said, as other candidates tried to interrupt the CNN moderators and get in a word. “Does Ted Cruz rule out ever legalizing people that are in this country illegally now? Do you rule it out?”
Cruz then stated flatly: “I have never supported legalization, and I do not intend to support it.”
This flies in the face of established fact. In Cruz’s own words at the time, illegal immigrants would “still be eligible for legal status” under his amendment, which would have removed a path to citizenship, but not to legal status, from the legislation. Rubio at the time supported a path to citizenship, and still does, though his list of what needs to be done before that can happen has grown longer.
Cruz repeated several times in 2013 that his amendment would have made it possible for illegal immigrants to stay in the country permanently and become legally recognized persons, if not citizens. The Rubio campaign sent a list of Cruz’s comments to the press quickly after the exchange between the two senators, both sons of Cuban immigrants, for whom the immigration issue is both personal and highly political.
Cruz aides have said since 2013 that their boss was introducing his amendment in order to help defeat the bill, since a path to legal status was enough to win over Republican votes, but if it did not include a path to citizenship, many Democrats would vote against it. Democrats controlled the Senate at the time.
Cruz’s brief explanation Tuesday night, in response to Rubio’s persistent questions, of what he would do in the future was awkwardly worded and evasive. “I do not intend to support” legal status, he said.
Rubio spokesman Joe Pounder criticized Cruz’s answer as “a slick move that only a Washington politician would make.”
The debate over this issue and between Cruz and Rubio will continue to play out in the coming days and weeks. On Tuesday night in the moment, Cruz managed to take some wind out of Rubio’s sails, but in the process called his own veracity into question.
