Why Rubio is running away from the most prominent item on his résumé

By Washington Post

Marco Rubio had changed his mind.

 

It was December 2012. The Senate gym. Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) was making the ask. “You ought to be a part of this,” Durbin told Rubio (R-Fla.), as Rubio rode a stationary bike. Durbin and six other senators wanted to rewrite U.S. immigration laws. In the process, they wanted to give illegal immigrants a way to become legal residents and — eventually — citizens.

 

Just two years earlier, Rubio had been against doing that. “It is unfair,” he had said, as a tea party candidate for Senate, “to create an alternative pathway for individuals who entered illegally.”

 

But that morning in the gym, he was open to the idea. He was in.

 

With that, Rubio began the most consequential work he has done in Washington. As part of a bipartisan “Gang of Eight,” he would write and pass an 1,198-page immigration bill through the Senate.

For a brief moment, that bill looked like the biggest success of Rubio’s career.Now it looks like failure.

 

It turned out that Rubio had overestimated conservatives’ willingness to accept his hyper-complicated bill — and his own power to change their minds. Ultimately, the bill died in the House, his right-wing allies began to doubt his judgment and both sides of the immigration debate had grown irritated by Rubio’s tendency to change his mind.

 

Instead of a triumph, Rubio’s involvement with the immigration bill became a cautionary tale, about a gifted freshman who miscalculated his capability.

 

Now, as he begins a run for president, Rubio is left trying to run away from the most prominent item on his political résumé.

 

“It’s one of the worst squanderings of political capital I’ve ever witnessed,” said Steve Deace, an Iowa-based conservative radio host whom Rubio tried and failed to persuade. “It was the first time he ever stepped out in public in leadership on an issue, and it was in diametric opposition to the base.”

Last week, when Rubio announced he was running, he made only a brief — and vague — reference to a desire to “modernize our immigration laws.” In an interview with NPR, Rubio sought to take credit for being — at varying times — on both sides of the same bill.

 

He tried to pass it. And, at the same time, he warned that it wasn’t good enough.

 

“I’ve done more immigration than Hillary Clinton ever did. I mean, I helped pass an immigration bill in a Senate dominated by Democrats. And that’s more than she’s ever done,” Rubio said. “It didn’t work because at the end of the day, we did not sufficiently address the issue of, of illegal immigration, and I warned about that throughout that process.”