Following up on Robert Costa’s interview with Senator Rubio, the Wall Street Journal reports that Rubio’s DREAM 2.0 push is dead for now:
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said Monday that President Barack Obama’s move last week to block deportations for some young illegal immigrants in the U.S. has likely derailed his own similar efforts, at least until after the election.
“People are going to say to me, ‘Why are we going to need to do anything on this now. It has been dealt with. We can wait until after the election,’” Sen. Rubio said in an interview. “And it is going to be hard to argue against that.” …
The president’s unilateral declaration on Friday, Sen. Rubio said, “sets back our efforts to arrive at a balanced and responsible approach to this issue. It poisons the well. It leads to mistrust. It makes it harder to come up with a long-term solution.”
So there might be a silver lining to the president’s DREAM decree after all. I say that because Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker piece on what a second Obama term would look like reports that amnesty would be the top priority:
But if, as seems likely, Obama will have just one chance of achieving a major piece of domestic legislation in his second term, the most promising focus, according to current and former aides, would be on immigration. . . . Obama’s advisers believe that the politics of immigration may be the only chance for bipartisanship after Taxmageddon.
Let’s hope the “second term” talk is purely hypothetical, but if the president does manage to get reelected, the arrogance and lawlessness of his DREAM decree make it much less likely any Republican would be willing to work with him on amnesty, significantly reducing the odds of passage. Mickey Kaus notes a corollary:
It’s now an open question which candidate is more likely to implement a misguided “comprehensive” amnesty. I’d say Romney’s latest comments put him in the lead–he’s promising to take it up as one of his first initiatives. And he’s taking his cues from “gotta-please-Latinos” advisers. … With Obama, we know it’s probably not going to get done (assuming there’s a Republican House), and if it gets done it’s not going to get done quickly or easily. . . .
I had this same fear when McCain was running, but I’m hoping Mickey is wrong this time. Hoping …