Commentary
By Frances
RiceThe majority of Floridians, including me, gave Senator Marco Rubio a pass on his shortcomings, since no human being is perfect, and voted for him to be our senator.
We believed Mr. Rubio would fight against the liberal Democrats who are refusing to secure our borders, failing to defend our national security adequately and destroying our economy with their socialist policies.
To our utter amazement, after Mr. Rubio arrived in Washington, he turned his back on us by embracing liberal Democrats and pushing for amnesty, as explained in the below article.
The voters in Florida were, in a word, "conned" by Mr. Rubio.
Now, a message is being sent loudly and clearly by Republican primary voters.
We are fed up with the Washington establishment.
We want a non-politician with business experience in the White House, a person who is not beholden to special interests and has the intestinal fortitude to take on the Washington establishment and their media allies. That person is the only self-funded candidate in the race for the presidency--Donald J. Trump.
Marco
Rubio Pushed for Immigration Reform With Conservative Media
By Jason Horowitzeb
A few weeks after Senator Marco Rubio
joined a bipartisan push for an immigration overhaul in 2013, he arrived
alongside Senator Chuck Schumer at the executive dining room of News
Corporation’s Manhattan headquarters for dinner.
Their mission was to persuade Rupert
Murdoch, the owner of the media empire, and Roger Ailes, the chairman and chief
executive of its Fox News division, to keep the network’s on-air personalities
from savaging the legislation and give it a fighting chance at survival.
Mr. Murdoch, an advocate of
immigration reform, and Mr. Ailes, his top lieutenant and the most powerful man
in conservative television, agreed at the Jan. 17, 2013, meeting to give the
senators some breathing room.
But the media executives, highly
attuned to the intensifying anger in the Republican grass roots, warned that
the senators also needed to make their case to Rush Limbaugh, the king of
conservative talk radio, who held enormous sway with the party’s largely
anti-immigrant base.
So the senators supporting the
legislation turned to Mr. Rubio, the Florida Republican, to reach out to Mr.
Limbaugh.
The dinner at News Corporation
headquarters — which has not been previously reported — and the subsequent
outreach to Mr. Limbaugh illustrate the degree to which Mr. Rubio served as the
chief envoy to the conservative media for the group supporting the legislation.
The bill would have provided a pathway to American citizenship for 11 million
illegal immigrants along with measures to secure the borders and ensure that
foreigners left the United States upon the expiration of their visas.
It is a history that Mr. Rubio is not
eager to highlight as he takes on Donald J. Trump, his rival for the Republican
presidential nomination, who has made his vow to crack down on illegal
immigration a centerpiece of his campaign.
Those discussions of just a few years
ago now seem of a distant era, when, after the re-election of President Obama,
momentum was building to overhaul the nation’s immigration system.
The senators embarked on a tour of
editorial boards and newsrooms, and Mr. Rubio was even featured as the
“Republican savior” on the cover of Time magazine for his efforts to change
immigration laws. He already was being mentioned as a 2016 presidential
contender.
Now Mr. Trump has become the
Republican leader in national polls by picking fights with Mr. Ailes and
offending the Latino voters whom Mr. Rubio had hoped to bring into the
Republican fold. And while Mr. Rubio ultimately abandoned the bipartisan
legislation in the face of growing grass-roots backlash and the collapse of the
conservative media truce, he, and to a certain degree Fox News, are still
paying for that dinner.
Fox’s ratings remain strong, but its
standing among Republican viewers, influenced by Mr. Trump’s offensive, has
dropped to a three-year low, according to YouGov BrandIndex. And Mr. Rubio’s
opponents, for whom Mr. Schumer, a Democrat from New York, has become the
ultimate villain, continue to depict the Florida Republican as a duplicitous
establishment insider.
“If you look at the ‘Gang of Eight,’
one individual on this stage broke his promise to the men and women who elected
him and wrote the amnesty bill,” Senator Ted Cruz said of Mr. Rubio during
Thursday’s Republican debate. And as Mr. Rubio defended himself, Mr. Trump’s
campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, posted “MARCO ‘AMNESTY’ RUBIO” on Twitter.
The so-called Gang of Eight was four
Democrats and four Republicans, including Mr. Rubio, who drafted an immigration
bill in 2013. It passed the Senate but was stymied by conservative opposition
in the House.
Details of the dinner, and a previous
one in 2011, were provided to The New York Times by an attendee of one of the
meetings and two people with knowledge of what was discussed at both
get-togethers.
None of the attendees agreed to be
identified for this article because the conversations were supposed to be
confidential.
But on Monday, Mr. Limbaugh shed light
on his interactions with the senators when he told a caller frustrated with his
criticism of Mr. Rubio that the immigration position the senator had advocated
“comes right out of the Gang of Eight bill.”
Mr. Limbaugh added, “I’ve had it
explained to me by no less than Senator Schumer.”
Mr. Schumer declined to comment for
this article. But before Mr. Obama’s re-election and soon afterward, he could
hardly stop talking with conservative senators and media power brokers about
the chance to pass comprehensive immigration legislation.
As early as March 9, 2011, Mr. Schumer
joined Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and another
eventual member of the Gang of Eight, at the Palm restaurant in Manhattan,
where they made their case to Mr. Murdoch, Mr. Ailes and Mr. Limbaugh in a
private room. The senators argued how damaging the word “amnesty” was to their
efforts, and walked Mr. Limbaugh through their vision for an immigration
overhaul.
The senators were especially eager to
try to neutralize conservative media, which proved lethal to a big push for
immigration changes in 2007. A study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for
Excellence in Journalism showed that conservative news shows had devoted about
a quarter of their time to immigration.
In late 2012, after Mitt Romney, the
Republican nominee, lost the presidential election in part because of his
dismal performance with Latino voters, Mr. Rubio joined the fight. On one
Sunday alone in April 2013, he made an appearance on seven talk shows to
advocate the immigration overhaul, including on “Fox News Sunday.”
Mr. Rubio also reached out to other
conservative power brokers, including the radio hosts Mark Levin and Laura
Ingraham, telling them that the legislation did not amount to amnesty. The Fox
anchors Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly became more supportive.
At the time, The Washington Post
reported that Mr. Rubio’s advisers were monitoring to the minute how much time the
hosts devoted to immigration, and that “they are heartened that the volume is
much diminished.”
Mr. Rubio publicly and privately
worked to assuage the fears of Mr. Limbaugh, who on air called him a
“thoroughbred conservative” and assured one wary listener that “Marco Rubio is
not out to hurt this country or change it the way the liberals are.”
On Jan. 29, 2013, the same day Mr.
Obama highlighted immigration in Las Vegas, Mr. Limbaugh had Mr. Rubio on as a
guest to talk about immigration and called him “admirable and noteworthy”
during a warm conversation about the bipartisan immigration plan.
“I know for you border security is the
first and last — if that doesn’t happen, none of the rest does, right?” Mr.
Limbaugh lobbed.
“Well, not just that,” swung Mr.
Rubio. “That alone is not enough.”
The conversation concluded with Mr.
Rubio saying: “Thank you for the opportunity, Rush. I appreciate it.”
“You bet,” Mr. Limbaugh said.
