Posted on 07/27/2013 7:54:16 AM PDT by Fiji Hill
Since he became the face of the hated S. 744 – the Senate’s Gang of Eight amnesty for illegal immigrants bill – Florida’s Republican Senator Marco Rubio has experienced one of the most precipitous falls from grace we can recall in our over 50-years of involvement in conservative politics at the national level.
A year ago Rubio was at the top, or running second, in pretty much every important measure of Republican preference for the Party’s 2016 presidential nomination.
Today, he isn’t even in the top ten in our CHQ straw poll [22] and stands at number five in a recent Iowa poll.
Many conservatives have asked how could Rubio, whose political instincts and conservative positions helped him defeat Florida’s incumbent Republican Governor to claim the GOP Senate nomination and general election victory get sucked-in to being the face of the corrupt, pork-barrel ridden, amnesty for illegal immigrants bill that S. 744 became.
Marco Rubio should have been smart enough to see that any “comprehensive” immigration bill, like S. 744 that gets the enthusiastic support of partisan Democrats, like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, New York Senator Charles Schumer, Illinois Senator Richard Durbin and President Barack Obama is almost by definition bad for Republicans and contrary to conservative principles.
Otherwise it wouldn’t be supported by Obama, Reid, Schumer, Durbin and the like – for evidence of the truth of that analysis witness the common sense amendments sponsored by Senators Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Mike Lee and Jeff Sessions that were shot down in the Democratic controlled Senate because they took a principled conservative approach to solving our nation’s illegal immigration problem.
Rubio could have and should have broken ranks with the Gang of Eight to support those amendments – but he didn’t.
And there’s a one word answer for the big question why he didn’t.
Staff.
Rubio’s senior staff, particularly in Washington, is a bunch of establishment Republican insiders, with long-established ties to radical Hispanic organizations, not the boat-rocking Tea Partiers that provided the manpower for Rubio’s upstart campaign against Governor Charlie Crist.
Chief of Staff Cesar Conda was a Romney operative and it is worth noting has long-time ties to Congressman Paul Ryan, too. Conda is no movement conservative, having worked for a series of moderate Republicans and cheap-labor-loving lobbies, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Conda also has longstanding ties to Hispanic Leadership Fund (HLF) president Mario Lopez, who regularly trashes those who question the Gang of Eight approach as “nativist.”
Lopez, while not on Rubio’s Senate staff, has been regularly brought to meetings by Rubio and his staff to discredit groups like the Center for Immigration Studies, NumbersUSA, and Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).
Communications Director Alex Burgos, a longtime amnesty proponent, is also particularly influential with his Boss on the issue of illegal immigration and amnesty for illegal aliens.
Burgos is no conservative (he’s a former Romney staffer) and his vitriolic attacks on conservatives are straight out of the Republican establishment’s playbook on how to alienate the GOP base.
Indeed if you sift through Senator’s Rubio’s staff and consultants you’d be hard pressed to find many who have strong roots in the Tea Party or conservative movement – from consultant Todd Harris, formerly of the McCain and Arnold Schwarzenegger operations, to a long list of staffers who are George W. Bush alumni, like Brian Walsh and Victor Cervino.
Who you walk with tells me a lot about who you are, and who Marco Rubio walks with every day in his Capitol Hill office explains a lot about who he has become since reaching Washington DC.
It's right here at FR!
This suggests to me that Congressmen should have to do without staff. That way they would have to read and write legislation, do their own damn research, and actually think about the votes they take on bills.
Yes!!
Ten thumbs way, way up.
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