Senator Rubio has been making a big deal of the border enforcement "trigger" that would have to be met before the amnestied illegals would be able to move from their immediately-issued green-card-lite status to a full green card. I thinks that's a mistake for a whole variety of reasons, but at least he seems to genuinely believe in the trigger idea.
Well, Senator Schumer dumped a bucket of cold water on that at a press conference yesterday, when he said, "We are not using border security as a block to a path to citizenship. This [the trigger] will not be a barrier to giving citizenship to the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in our country."
Schumer having acknowledged the fraudulent nature of the trigger idea, will Rubio now do the honorable thing and withdraw his backing for the Gang of Eight's framework?
Senator Vitter the other day on Laura Ingraham criticized Rubio's stance on immigration as "naïve" and "nuts". The "nuts" part was probably going too far, but "naïve" is correct. I saw the same thing in the previous amnesty battle; I was on a panel with a top McCain immigration staffer and afterwards asked some very elementary question about immigration — and she had no idea what I was even talking about. Kennedy's staff were professionals in the immigration business, knowledgeable about every nook and cranny of the immigration law, knowing just how to craft a provision so that it sounded plausible to the Republican immigration amateurs but was meaningless in reality.
Schumer's staff has picked up Kennedy's mantle and is taking Rubio's people for a ride. (The alternative is that Rubio knew the trigger was a fraud all along, but I choose not to believe that.)
At least now Rubio knows he was tricked. The next step is up to him.
