by Dish Staff
Kilgore remarks upon Rubio’s immigration “course correction“:
It really is amazing the extent to which partisan and ideological predispositions can affect how one interprets the same data. I look at Marco Rubio’s behavior on the immigration issue over the last sixteen months and see an unusually shameless flip-flop by a man willing to do almost anything to become president. Byron York looks at the same behavior, and even acknowledges the remarkable extent of self-contradiction going on; yet he purports to see Rubio as a brave and realistic pro-immigration-reform leader who is executing a “course correction” because he understands “the people” need some good vicious border enforcement before they’ll calm down enough to accept the mass legalization, a.k.a. “amnesty,” that conservative activists are sworn to oppose to the very last ditch.
Allahpundit yawns:
The fact that Rubio’s now endorsing a piecemeal, sequential “security first” option is getting media attention today but it’s really nothing new. His retreat from comprehensive reform has been a long one. He was talking up a sequential approach last October, with the ink on the Gang of Eight bill newly dry, after he temporarily became border hawks’ public enemy number one.
But Chait posits that the “newest iteration of Rubio is the opposite of the figure he and party leaders envisioned last year” and that the “transformation ought to terrify them”:
The trouble for Republicans is that the political theater created by the Dreamers is not going to stop. They can try their best to control officially sanctioned media debates, but the Dreamers are staging debates without permission, endlessly highlighting the cruelty of the Republican stance. It is a strategy for which the Republicans so far have no answer. The symbolic denouement of Rubio’s immigration debacle may well be an angry old man brandishing his cane at young Dreamers.
Rubio is also getting a lot of press for allegedly threatening to shutdown the government. Vinik thinks this is a media fabrication:
On Tuesday night, the Huffington Post published an article with the headline: “Marco Rubio Hints At A Government Shutdown Fight Over Immigration.” The problem is that Rubio, who was quoted from an interview with Breitbart, doesn’t come close to threatening a government shutdown. Here’s what he said: “There will have to be some sort of a budget vote or a continuing resolution vote, so I assume there will be some sort of a vote on this. I’m interested to see what kinds of ideas my colleagues have about using funding mechanisms to address this issue.” That’s not hinting at a government shutdown. It’s Rubio saying he wants to use the budget process to put pressure on the Democrats to vote on Obama’s controversial immigration policies.
But Molly Ball sees a shutdown as a real possibility. She hears from a “well-placed House Republican source” that the “GOP leadership is increasingly nervous about the potential for a rebellion on the funding bill”:
[N]ot all Republicans are convinced the shutdown was such a disaster for them. A few weeks ago in Texas, I watched Cruz tell a roomful of conservative activists that the fight to defund Obamacare was actually a partial victory. “If you listen to Democrats, if you listen to the media—although I repeat myself—they will tell you that fight last summer and fall didn’t succeed,” he said. But, he asked, “Where are we now today?” The president’s approval ratings are lower than ever, voters overwhelmingly dislike Obamacare, and Republicans have a chance at winning a dozen or more Senate seats. Rather than suffer a setback in the shutdown (which he did not mention), Cruz said, “I believe we have laid the foundation for winning the war to repeal Obamacare.”
If conservatives buy Cruz’s logic, which they tend to do, the prospect of another shutdown might not scare them much. And that could mean Congress is headed for trouble.
The Dish 