Senator Ted Cruz faulted his Republican presidential rival Marco Rubio Thursday for voting against border-security amendments to the Gang of Eight immigration bill, an attack that makes explicit the veiled shots he took at Rubio during the GOP debate in Milwaukee on Tuesday.
Cruz set out to debunk Rubio’s statement that he has become convinced effective border-security measures must be implemented before Congress provides legal status to any legal immigrants. “As a voter, when politicians are saying the exact opposite of what they did in office, I treat that with a pretty healthy degree of skepticism,” he told talk-radio host Laura Ingraham. “The Gang of Eight voted as a gang against enforcing and securing the border.”
The Texas presidential candidate’s comments could be the opening salvo in a hot war that political observers have expected since the Fox Business debate Tuesday. “Now, I think, people are looking at Cruz as the candidate who’s best positioned in a lane to run with Rubio and give him a real fight,” GOP operative Bruce Haynes told Politico.
#share#Rubio has worked to reassure conservatives that he’s learned from his 2013 support of the failed immigration-reform bill. “What I’ve learned is you can’t even have a conversation about [illegal immigrants already in the country] until people believe and know, not just believe, but it’s proven to them, that future illegal immigration is brought under control,” he said at CPAC in February.
He offered a more fundamental critique of his former allies at the NRI summit in May. “One of the problems I have with the groups out there that are advocating for immigration reform, some of them, is they approach this debate with the argument that [illegal immigrants] have a right to be here,” Rubio said. “It’s not a right. . . . There is no right to illegally immigrate anywhere in the world.”
Cruz argued that such epiphanies shouldn’t be taken seriously. “It’s not like people were quiet in sharing their concerns at the time,” he told Ingraham. “It’s not like this was rocket science.”
— Joel Gehrke is a political reporter for National Review.