Marco Rubio Is Trying To Have It Both Ways On Immigration Reform

In January, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined a group of eight senators working to pass comprehensive immigration reform with a path to citizenship for the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants. Appearing on a series of conservative talk radio stations to promote the plan, the first-term senator characterized the effort as “the first step” in the long road toward fixing the nation’s broken immigration system and said he expected to incorporate changes from both President Obama and the American public before any bill could become law.

“All we can come up with is a starting point…there are, you know, 94 other senators who have opinions about what this law should look like and there is the American public and there is the House and the Executive Branch so obviously people are going to have some input as to what they want it to look like …this is the first step, this is the architecture,” Rubio told Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey in January.

But on Sunday, Rubio signaled that he has little actual interest in collaborating with the White House on reform. After USA Today published a leaked and incomplete draft of President Obama’s immigration reform bill — which resembles 2007's bipartisan legislation and Rubio’s own principles — the first-term senator rushed a statement condemning the administration for contributing to the very debate he claimed would be incomplete without its input. Rather than offering a constructive critique of the leaked portions or highlighting areas of similarity, Rubio announced that Obama’s bill is “disappointing to those of us working on a serious solution” and is “dead on arrival in Congress.”

The statement, designed to convince conservatives that the immigration reform principles Rubio supports differ drastically from Obama’s, is particularly jarring in light of the senator’s past insistance that the president should lead on immigration.

Earlier this year, Rubio told the Wall Street Journal that Obama has “not done a thing” on reform and is likely using the issue to mobilize the Democratic base. During the presidential campaign, Rubio criticized Obama for failing to achieve reform in his first term. “His party controlled Congress for two years,” he told Fox News in October, “and they did absolutely nothing.”

But now that Obama is engaged with the issue, Rubio is still outraged: He’s claiming that the president is undermining the Congressional legislative process by developing an alternative plan should bipartisan talks break down while complaining that Obama isn’t involved enough in one-on-one conversations with lawmakers.

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Marco Rubio's authentic conservatism

By Christopher Malone, associate professor and chairman, Department of Political Science, Pace University, New York City - 02/15/13 02:00 PM ET

Eager to change face of the party and the trajectory of electoral politics, Republicans put 41 year-old Florida Senator Marco Rubio in the daunting position of offering the rebuttal to Tuesday’s State of the Union address by President Obama. Dry mouths and water bottles aside, real questions about the future of the Republican Party persisted: what brand of conservatism would Rubio illuminate, (how) does it differ from what we’ve heard in the recent past, and will it prove successful?  

In many ways, the substance of the Rubio speech was completely in line with mainstream Republican dogma. America as an exceptional nation. An unshakeable belief in free enterprise. A nod to the value of life “at every stage.” Fewer taxes. Less spending. Less debt. Less government. Where Rubio and Republicans seek to grow the economy, President Obama and Democrats simply want to grow government.

All very typical and expected themes and contrasts. At the same time, the speech had a decidedly sharper target than we’ve seen by the Republican Party in the past. Rubio uttered the phrase “working class” or “middle class” seventeen times in a speech that ran less than fifteen minutes. In every way imaginable, Rubio sought to drill down on one indelible point. Obama would have you believe that an activist federal government fosters expansion of the middle class. But as Rubio put it, “More government isn’t going to help you get ahead, it’s going to hold you back.”

To be sure, this was not a speech about the makers and the takers, the 47%, self-deportation, or class warfare. In fact, the only reference to the rich was when Rubio concluded: “So Mr. President, I don't oppose your plans because I want to protect the rich. I oppose your plans because I want to protect my neighbors.”

Imagine Mitt Romney or John McCain uttering that line. They would first have to decide which neighbors of the 14 homes they own between the two of them they were talking about.

It is here that Rubio offered what may be a new emerging branding of the Republican Party. I’ll call it "Authentic Conservatism".

In the 1950s, William F. Buckley set out to show that conservatives had brains – something that Paul Ryan and Bobby Jindal have revived recently. Jindal doesn’t want his to be the “stupid party,” certainly a dig at the anti-intellectualism fostered by the likes of Sarah Palin and her supporters.

In the 1960s, Barry Goldwater set out to show that conservatives had a conscience. Perhaps they needed ideas and ideology, but what mattered more to Goldwater was an inner integrity that, as he put it sees “the whole man.”

In the 1970s, Richard Nixon, drawing on past experience with Dwight Eisenhower, set out to prove that conservatives had a heart – an idea most certainly revived by George W. Bush in the late 1990s with his emphasis on “compassionate conservatism.”

Then came Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Reagan is seen by conservatives as a transformative figure because, for them, he embodied all of these strands of conservatism. By standing his ground, Reagan showed he had integrity. With the humility in his smile, the shake of his head, and a joke on his lips, Uncle Ronnie showed he had heart. And despite attempts by the left to paint him as the know-nothing former actor, the Gipper had intellect.

What Rubio offered the Republican Party in his SOTU rebuttal was not any or all of these things, but something different: the son of two working class Latino immigrants who lives in the same neighborhood he grew up in, who inherited nothing but the opportunity his parents and America afforded him, and who can potentially connect voters through that biography to a Republican message that has been seen as overly harsh, out of touch, and outdated.

In a word, he has offered conservatism a lifeline through authenticity.

It is the closest the Republican Party has come to an identity politics which has been both the strength and the weakness of the Democratic Party since the 1960s.

The need for authentic conservatism is clear. When asked which candidate cares about people like me, 81% chose Barack Obama in the 2012 election. Rubio’s emergence reflects that disparity. Yes, he may help with the Republicans’ Latino problem – that is a big maybe. But his identity politics goes even further. He is one of us. He is real. This is something Republicans have not had in a leader of color ever.

We should be clear: this is not a policy makeover. Authentic conservatism involves nothing more than a retooling of the message delivered by the authentic messenger. It remains to be seen if Authentic Conservatism can bridge the wide demographic divide Republicans face in the years ahead.

Malone is associate professor and chairman of the Department of Political Science at Pace University in New York City.

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GOP ‘Savior’ Marco Rubio Falls Back On The Same Old Anti-Woman Policies

In an interview on Thursday with conservative magazine Newsmax, Tea Party standard-bearer and so-called ‘savior’ of the Republican party Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) revealed that he will become a cosponsor of the “Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act.” The bill is a concerted effort to prevent girls in dangerous family situations from going across state lines to receive abortions.

Familiarly known as “the Grandmother Incarceration Act,” CIANA bills have come up in Congress several times in recent years. Nearly every iteration of the legislation would prevent even a victim of rape or incest from getting a ride to an abortion clinic beyond state lines from her grandmother or older sibling, if she is under the age of 18. Instead, the girl would be forced to inform her parents or legal guardian, and be required to have them present.

While the bill has not yet been introduced, previous versions of the text would even apply the requirements to girls who require a medically necessary, potentially lifesaving abortion.

The fact that Rubio will serve as a co-sponsor on the legislation reveals a lot about the supposed new face of the Republican party. The policy, like many of Rubio’s policy choices, is actually an old trick from the Grand Old Party, not some new approach to Republican ideals. And it falls in line with Rubio’s party’s, and the Senator’s own, recent anti-woman efforts:

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE: Rubio voted against the Violence Against Women Act because it allocated money to rape victims.

MINIMUM WAGE: He won’t support a minimum wage, despite its huge benefits for women.

BIRTH CONTROL: The senator introduced a bill that would have prevented millions of women from accessing birth control.

PAY EQUITY: He called a bill to promote pay equity between men and women “nothing but an effort to help trial lawyers.”

With his post-State of the Union rebuttal, Rubio signed up to be the face of a Republican party that is working hard to win over women and people of color, the groups that cost Republicans the election last time around. But with Rubio’s history of anti-woman policies, and now his renewed commitment to co-sponsor more of the same, he may just on the vanguard of a new Republican path back to the same Republican problems.

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