For Cruz and Rubio, a bitter brawl over immigration
|
Version 0 of 1. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), two first-term senators who often cite their families’ emigration from Cuba in pursuit of the American Dream, have engaged in an aggressive battle to define each other’s positions on immigration and border security. That heated contest led to a lengthy and bitter clash at Tuesday’s presidential debate as each lawmaker tried to derail the other on one of the most important issues for conservative voters. Their dispute centers largely on a debate over the comprehensive immigration and border bill that Rubio negotiated with seven senators in spring 2013, which won a sweeping bipartisan majority but split the Republican caucus and eventually died in the Republican-controlled House. Cruz accuses Rubio of supporting “amnesty” for helping negotiate the bill two years ago, while Rubio lobs charges that Cruz is trying to run from his own record on supporting some version of legal status for illegal immigrants In the Las Vegas debate, Rubio fired the first shot by trying to paint Cruz as a regular politician backing away from his record. “Ted, you support legalizing people who are in this country illegally. Ted Cruz supported a 500 percent increase in the number of H-1 visas, the guest workers that are allowed into this country, and Ted supports doubling the number of green cards,” Rubio said. Cruz rejected any similarity between his record on immigration and Rubio’s: “There was one commentator that put it this way,” Cruz said, “. . . for Marco to suggest our record’s the same is like suggesting the fireman and the arsonist [are the same] because they are both at the scene of the fire.” In May 2013, shortly after Rubio’s “Gang of Eight” negotiated the legislation, it came before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where Cruz sat as one of the most junior members on the panel. Barely five months in office, Cruz offered a string of amendments over the several weeks as the committee considered the legislation: one to dramatically expand the number of special visas for highly skilled immigrants, another to provide a legal-worker status to some illegal immigrants. They were bids to modify the language that Rubio, along with veteran Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), had proposed. The centerpiece of the immigration language set up a more than decade-long pathway to citizenship for the more than 11 million illegal immigrants already in the United States, if they met a detailed set of criteria. Cruz and other conservative critics said the proposal amounted to an amnesty for undocumented immigrants. More than 2 1/2 years after losing his bid to modify the legislation, Cruz found himself on the defensive Wednesday over charges that his 2013 amendments undercut his current immigration message or painted him as a Senate insider at odds with his anti-establishment image. Conservative outlets such as the National Review published scathing editorials questioning Cruz, and in an interview on Fox News, he struggled to explain his tactics. One Cruz amendment would have amounted to giving legal status to illegal workers here now, stopping short of granting citizenship. Another would have taken the allotment of H-1B visas, for highly skilled foreign workers, from 65,000 to 325,000, a proposal that Cruz touted as an example of “legal immigration” that he supported. Under steady questioning Tuesday night from Rubio, Cruz rejected ever having supported any sort of legal status for illegal immigrants and vowed never to do so, an assertion that the Florida senator’s campaign pounced on the next day, feeding the apparent contradictions to media outlets. “I have never supported legalization, and I do not intend to support legalization,” Cruz said during the debate. Cruz’s advisers in recent weeks have defended his actions in 2013 as steps to insert a “poison pill” into the immigration legislation, with the hope of killing it. Privately, some Democrats on Wednesday agreed that he was not actively supporting the positions in his amendments back then and was instead just trying to blow up the process. That is because Democrats and Republicans, along with respective allies in the labor movement and corporate America, worked for months to craft their fragile coalition to get the backing of such major institutions as the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. One such critical position was keeping the number of H-1B visas at 65,000, because unions have traditionally opposed the program as something that eats into jobs that could go to U.S. workers. One Democrat, requesting anonymity to talk about the private deliberations at the time, said Cruz’s bid to increase those visas fivefold was “cleverly trying to split our coalition” — if Republicans on the committee had supported the amendment, as the chamber would normally support, it would have caused unions to withdraw support and the legislation probably would have died. Democrats pointed to the vote breakdown on one key Cruz amendment, replacing the path to citizenship with legal-work status, as evidence that committee members treated it as an effort to sabotage the entire legislative effort: the three Republicans who eventually supported the legislation sided with every Democrat in rejecting it. McCain said Wednesday that Cruz’s current rhetoric does not match his positions back then. “Well, the fact is that Cruz had proposed an amendment to expand H-1B’s, I mean, that’s not in keeping with what he’s saying now,” said McCain, who has frequently clashed with Cruz. “It’s remarkable. It’s remarkable.” He rejected the “poison pill” proposition from Cruz supporters. “Why would you want to do such a thing?” McCain said. “Suppose that it was agreed to. I’m familiar with a lot of things, but I’m not familiar with attempts to pass an amendment to blow up a bill.” But Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the most senior opponent of the immigration bill, defended Cruz’s position, saying he was clearly against the legislation. “It was a very decisive, historic vote, and Cruz was a valuable and articulate opponent, and Marco was an articulate proponent,” Sessions said. |