Lengthy explanation of your position. Thanks for sharing. Glaring fault: no comprehension of Senate procedure.
Example: Cruz, Lee, Sessions could not offer amendments to remove underlying legalization because that would be re-writing the base structure of the bill. The only way to do that in a markup (which is what we call the sessions during which the parent committee amends and re-writes bills) is to offer what is called a “sponsors amendment.” That gets its name, as you may have guessed, from amendments offered by a bill’s sponsoring Senators. As neither Cruz, nor Sessions, nor Lee were sponsors, no such amendment altering the fundamentals could be offered by them.
Therefore, the best those three stalwart conservative members of the Judiciary Committee could do was offer a long list of amendments doomed to failure to have a record of just how awful the bill was. Examples included the Cruz pathway to citizenship amendment, and a Sessions bill changing legal immigration quotas.
Again, this is procedural minutiae that quite often makes lay men’s eyes glaze over. If immigration reform champion Sessions, rock-solid conservative Lee, and FReepers with years of experience are telling you exactly why your argument doesn’t hold water, perhaps it’s time you listen.
Which begs the question why they would bother to try, if they were opposed to do something that could not be taken out of the bill. All that said, all of Cruz's stated support for this bill, the rhetoric that was being used at that time, the evidence from Rush's show, proves beyond any reasonable doubt that legalization in and of itself was not a matter of debate, but was an accepted given. In Cruz's case, he openly advocated for it, not just during the fight, but after that, as my first link in my post demonstrates.
FReepers with years of experience
FReepers with "years of experience" aren't all that they're cracked up to be.