Fox News' Bret Baier of Special Report really caught Senator Ted Cruz off guard in their one-on-one interview Wednesday. Baier called him on his initial stance to give legal status to immigrants.
Cruz was mumbling and bumbling and stumbling, trying to explain his way out of his 2013 "path to citizenship" immigration flip flop stances. During Tuesday's debate, Marco Rubio and Cruz sparred on who was more for amnesty than the other. It was a typical he said, she said - or - "no I didn't," "yes you did," back and forth.
Bret was ready to go toe to toe with Cruz and really made him look surprisingly foolish:
So it was borderline stunning to see Cruz squirm on Fox News Channel on Wednesday evening, when Bret Baier challenged the Republican presidential candidate’s assertion — made in Tuesday’s debate — that he has never supported allowing undocumented immigrants to obtain legal status.
Baier cited interviews and statements Cruz made on the Senate floor in 2013, when he was pushing an amendment to the so-called “Gang of Eight” immigration bill (Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, another GOP White House hopeful, was in the gang) that laid out a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Cruz wanted to take citizenship off the table but made clear at the time that he would be willing to grant some legal status.
As Baier pointed out, Cruz’s earlier statements don’t jibe with what he said on the debate stage in Las Vegas: “I've never supported legalization; I do not intend to support it.”
Baier played a tape of Cruz’s May 2013 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, in which he said: “I don’t want immigration reform to fail; I want immigration reform to pass. And so I would urge people of good faith on both sides of the aisle, if the objective is to pass common-sense immigration reform that secures the borders, that improves legal immigration and that allows those here illegally to come out of the shadows, then we should look for areas of bipartisan agreement and compromise to come together.”
Cruz was clearly stuck. He tried to argue that his objective was to “defeat Marco Rubio’s amnesty” with his amendment. But Baier fired back with Cruz’s own words: “The problem, though, is that at the time you were telling people like Byron York with the Washington Examiner that this was not a poison pill. You told him, ‘My objective was not to kill immigration reform.’ You said you wanted it to pass at the time.”
Now, this might be a fluke. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that Cruz will use the uncomfortable exchange with Baier to up his game going forward.
