What Does Fate Have In Store For Marco Rubio?

2016 is probably not going to be a good year for former Tea Party darling Marco Rubio. He's never faced a well-armed Democrat before and slipped into the Senate with less than half the votes cast. In 2010, the Democrats had put up a token candidate-- Kendrick Meek-- to help turn out African-American voters in their failed attempt to win the gubernatorial race with another weak candidate, Alex Sink and Meek, a puppet of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, came in a distant third, behind "Independent-Republican" Charlie Crist. In 2016, Rubio will probably face the most politically astute and talented political leader Florida's had since Claude Pepper: Alan Grayson.

There's one sure way Rubio can save himself from Grayson-- getting the Republican presidential nominee to give him the vice presidential nomination. I can't see the GOP going with Cruz/Rubio, though… two extreme right-wing Cuban Americans! And Bush/Rubio won't work because of the Constitutional requirement that the President and Vice President be from separate states… or did Bush/Cheney abrogate that? Christie/Rubio would be funny-- especially up against the probable Democratic ticket, Hillary Clinton and Julián Castro.

In any case, Rubio has been working hard to make up with the teabaggers who felt let down by him when he co-sponsored bipartisan legislation that attempted to deal seriously with immigration reform. He may have pleased the Republican donor class but the boots on the ground extremists went bonkers and disowned him. Now he's giving them every reason under the sun to own him again-- even threatening a government shutdown over implementing any part of the immigration bill he wrote!

Republican propaganda writer Byron York is delighted to welcome Rubio back into the xenophobic fold, blithely referring to the flip-flopping Rubio as "the Senate's most knowledgeable voices" on immigration. Rubio's "knowledge" doesn't go beyond craven right-wing political strategies:

During the debate over the Senate Gang of Eight comprehensive immigration reform bill, Rubio often argued that if Congress did not act on reform, then Obama would do something big on his own that would be far worse than any comprehensive bill, at least from a Republican perspective. "My fundamental warning was that if [Republicans] didn't like the legalization provisions in the bill, it was quite possible, if we didn't act, that we would get the Gang of Eight-style legalization but without any of the bill's enforcement mechanisms," Rubio told me.

…Rubio argued that Obama's overreach could become a springboard for larger Republican action on immigration. If that happens, Rubio would like to see lawmakers take an approach to immigration reform far different from the Gang of Eight's [i.e., his own] comprehensive scheme.

…The bottom line is that Rubio now freely admits the Gang of Eight bill, to which he devoted so much of his energy and for which he risked his standing in the party, was fatally flawed in light of today's political environment. Now, with the GOP presidential season approaching, he advocates a significantly different course-- one that could be triggered by Barack Obama taking the step Rubio predicted all along.

Or, as one Twitter wag put it this morning: "Marco Rubio warns that Obama will carry out executive action that would delay deportations of people Rubio voted to give citizenship." Many think, though, that where Rubio is going to really hurt himself-- at least outside of GOP primaries-- is in regard to DREAMers. Jonathan Chait called him out on his headlong rush to be the next Republican candidate of self-deportation and electrified fences. He explains how the DREAMers media strategy is wrecking Rubio's hoped-for image as a serious, mainstream political leader.

The Dreamers are undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children. Since their parents decided to bring them, and since they grew up in the United States, deporting them to a foreign country would be unjust and cruel. The Dreamers have a simple media strategy: They publicly question Republican leaders wherever they appear, asking them to straightforwardly explain why they propose to have them deported. The confrontations are powerful and immensely awkward for their subjects. Rand Paul fled in terror; Paul Ryan awkwardly ignored the question. Rubio, speaking in South Carolina, opted for direct confrontation. The video, via Greg Sargent, is in some ways even worse:



The result of this encounter thrilled conservatives. The crowd booed the Dreamers. An angry 73-year-old audience member “stalked them out of the building, clutching his cane as if it were a baseball bat.” (The cane is the historic weapon of choice for South Carolina reactionaries.) Breitbart News exulted that Rubio had executed “a ‘Sister Souljah’-type moment.”

The analogy is revealing. Sister Souljah is a hip-hop artist who mused in 1992, “If Black people kill Black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” When Bill Clinton denounced her, it was taken as an emblem of his willingness to confront extreme elements of his own political base. Of course, the Dreamers are not an extremist element of the Republican base. Rubio’s confrontation with them is the opposite of a Sister Souljah moment, unless you refashion the metaphor in racial rather than ideological terms, so that Rubio was denouncing his own-- i.e., Latino-- kind. Neither interpretation bodes especially well for Rubio’s general election profile.

Of course, the 2016 campaign has hardly begun. (Though begun it has.) The trouble for Republicans is that the political theater created by the Dreamers is not going to stop. They can try their best to control officially sanctioned media debates, but the Dreamers are staging debates without permission, endlessly highlighting the cruelty of the Republican stance. It is a strategy for which the Republicans so far have no answer. The symbolic denouement of Rubio’s immigration debacle may well be an angry old man brandishing his cane at young Dreamers.

Greg Sargent summed up Rubio's transition for a serious senator to a Know Nothing xenophobe making a cheap play for the votes of core GOP voters who revel in their own ignorance and lack of a third digit to their IQs. Rubio is now to the right of the Mitt Romney positions that horrified normal-- if not right-wing-- American voters.

Note the distance that Rubio has traveled on this issue. In 2012, the “great Hispanic hope of the Republican Party” worked behind the scenes to move his own legislative version of legalization for undocumented immigrants brought here illegally as children. That was rendered inoperative when Obama announced Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, protecting many DREAMers from deportation. But in 2013, Rubio played a key role in passing immigration reform through the Senate with a path to citizenship for the 11 million.

Since then, Rubio has been making amends for his apostasy, apparently with an eye towards running for president next year, and here he is declaring to South Carolina conservatives that DREAMers are “doing harm to your own cause because you don’t have a right to illegally immigrate to the United States.”

Left unsaid is the reason for this: House Republicans would not vote on the Senate bill. They would not vote on any Republican proposals to legalize the 11 million. And they would not vote on even the House GOP equivalent of the DREAM act.

House Republicans did, however, vote on legislation to end DACA and strip protections from the DREAMers. They are opposed to anything Obama might do to expand that program, and will probably vote in the future against that, too. This has left Republicans in the position of advocating against Obama’s enforcement priorities-- that is, advocating against deprioritizing the removals of longtime residents with jobs, families or ties to their communities who don’t pose a public safety threat, the DREAMers included, to focus on the removal of serious criminals and recent border crossers. And though Republicans don’t like to admit this directly, they are now left advocating for refocusing enforcement priorities on the removal of those low-priority populations.

For Republicans, this is the inevitable result of building their posture on this issue largely around opposition to Obama-- both to his enforcement priorities, and to any executive actions he might take to implement them.

Today Rubio himself announced his opposition to any further executive actions. But it isn’t just Rubio. This is infecting other 2016 GOP presidential hopefuls, too. As Brian Beutler details, Rick Perry is also doing penance for his previous softness on this issue with calls for more militarization of the border. Ted Cruz played a key role in getting House Republicans to vote to end Obama’s deferred deportation programs. Even Rand Paul-- who has called for the GOP to grow more inclusive-- last week threw in his lot with the Cruz/Steve King wing of the party on the DREAMers. If Obama expands DACA, Republicans will likely face more pressure from GOP base voters to vow to roll that back-- escalating the numbers who would lose protection from deportation if Republicans get their way.

My best guess is that Rubio will be on everyone's short list for VP but that no one will go all the way with him. That means he will probably have to defend his seat and if Grayson can be persuaded to run, Florida will wind up will end up with bragging rights as the state with the best senator and Rubio will be able to devote himself full time to proving that his business and David Rivera's business only look intertwined. And, then there's… this: