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Marco Rubio's Immigration Cube

Senator Marco Rubio said he would vote no against his own immigration nill.

Hugh Hewitt and telling him that he won't even vote for his own bill.

HH: If those amendments don’t pass, will you yourself support the bill that emerged from Judiciary, Senator Rubio?

MR: Well, I think if those amendments don’t pass, then I think we’ve got a bill that isn’t going to become law, and I think we’re wasting our time. So the answer is no. If they don’t pass, then we’ve got to keep working to ensure that we get to a bill that can become a law. We’re not interested in passing a Senate bill. We’re interested in passing a law that reforms a broken legal immigration system, that begins to enforce the law, and that deals with the 11 million people who are here illegally. And that’s the goal of this endeavor.

And so if those amendments fail, we’ve got to go back to the drawing board and keep working until we can figure out one that will pass. But I don’t understand why anyone would be against it, as such, I don’t think there is a good reason to be against strengthening border security for our country.

Say, what? He led the charge in crafting the bill that got out of committee so what's up with passing much needed amendments now? And of course House Republicans will not pass the Senate bill, but that's why they get together afterwards and hammer out a final bill. Rubio either doesn't know how legislation is crafted or he's lying. I wasn't the only one dumbstruck at his words.

Here's Byron York trying to decipher his words as well.

Rubio’s turning on his own bill would be an extraordinary turn of events. After playing a major role in drafting the legislation, Rubio has been its public face since then, making countless appearances on television, radio, and in print to gather support for the legislation. What has changed that would mean he would not vote for his own bill? If anything, the security measures in the bill were slightly strengthened in the Senate Judiciary Committee; the bill’s original intention to apply new security provisions only to “high-risk” sectors of the U.S.-Mexico border was expanded to apply to all sectors.

So it would be hard to argue that the Judiciary Committee changed the bill in ways that would make it unacceptable to Rubio. But now he says he will vote against the bill approved by the committee, unless major changes are made. It is hard to tell if Rubio really disagrees with the substance of the legislation approved by the committee — he suggested to Hewitt that he would vote against the bill because it wouldn’t pass without the changes, not because he objected to particular passages in the bill — but the result would be that the principal author of comprehensive immigration reform would vote against it in the Senate.

Charles Pierce realizes that he's not the brightest bulb of the lot.

This is the most perfectly predictable scenario imaginable. The House Republicans are crazy and out of control and they scare the Senate Republicans a helluva lot more than Mitch McConnell does, and they scare McConnell most of all. Rubio was a Tea Party fave-rave when he ran in Florida. These are his people. He had to see this coming when he signed on as Judas goat for this sham. But he didn't because, politically, well, he's not exactly Everett Dirksen up there.

Whap!

Yes Rubio, Whap! indeed.

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