Las Vegas debate doesn’t scramble GOP field

Cruz, the senator from Texas, continued latching Rubio’s support for the bill to President Barack Obama and influential Democratic Sen.

In 2013, Cruz said that, under his amendment, undocumented immigrants “would still be eligible for legal status…so that they are out of the shadows, which the proponents of this bill repeatedly point to as their principal objective, to provide a legal status for those who are here illegally to be out of the shadows”.

So the new Rubio-Cruz phase of the campaign is a welcome development.

“Gov. Bush demonstrated on Tuesday night that he’s the guy that’s ready to be president of the United States, he’s the guy that’s ready to stand up to Donald Trump and challenge the totally un-serious, nonsensical and ridiculous things that he says”, Diaz told CNN.

(AP Photo/John Locher, File). The contrast was striking, with Rubio occupying the establishment conservative role and Cruz staking out a far more isolationist stance.

Regular readers may remember that I weighed in on Rubio and Cruz’s dispute in November. Their competing strategies played out in early voting states on Thursday as the freshman senators pushed to separate themselves from the crowded GOP field six weeks before the first primary votes are cast. “I don’t believe he’s gonna be the nominee, but I do think Donald has energized and excited a whole lot of people”, said Ted Cruz, (R) Presidential Candidate. “It’s not an attack”. At the debate, though, he bristled at Rubio’s account: “Look, I understand Marco wants to raise confusion”.

There were significant problems with the Gang of Eight bill, and Cruz’s amendments would not have resolved them all. The two forty-four-year-old Cuban-American senators from large Sun Belt states had several sharp exchanges about immigration and national security-the two connected issues that have dominated the Republican primary since the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino. “He’s a champion of legal immigration, but he’s also unabashedly a champion of border security”. Perhaps the better story is whether Cruz’s momentum is for real, or lasting. Cruz also took the opportunity in this week’s GOP debate to connect Rubio with the Gang of Eight bill, casting the bill’s provisions on refugees as too weak.

“I know the truth”, Dodson said of Cruz’s immigration record.

Asked to respond to Burr’s comments, a Cruz campaign spokeswoman, Catherine Frazier, passed along news reports from the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal from 2014 that contained the 20 percent to 30 percent figures Cruz used, along with congressional testimony from an NSA official suggesting the USA Freedom Act could expand the universe of calls available to the agency to search. In fact, Rubio slammed Charlie Crist for being pro-amnesty and very specifically said he opposed giving illegal aliens citizenship.

“Indeed, I led the fight against his legalization and amnesty”, Cruz declared, affirming his opposition to Rubio’s bill.

On immigration, both candidates fudged.

One amendment would “ensure that illegal immigrants are not given a path to citizenship”, while another would involve “doubling the overall worldwide green card caps from 675,000 visas per year to 1.35 million per year”.

While Cruz has defended that course on multiple occasions in the Senate and in interviews, on Thursday he said he was simply calling his opponents’ bluff. “We defeated amnesty and they are furious”. “We beat it”, Cruz said. “The senator has long said, both publicly and privately, that his best chance to secure the Republican nomination is to unite the conservative base behind him – and that the best way of doing so is to earn the backing of high-profile activist leaders in hopes that their endorsements trigger a cascade of support down to the grassroots level”.