Chuck Schumer, dastardly partisan
Sen. Marco Rubio has been showing signs of late that he thinks he got himself in a little too deep on immigration reform, and
The National Review is already getting ready for things to fall apart, by trying to set up Sen. Chuck Schumer as the Democratic fall guy.
As word came out that a deal was falling into place on immigration reform, Rubio basically said "whoa there, not so fast," calling for endless hearings and amendments on the deal he'd been involved with all along. The Florida Republican has a tough task, after all, balancing his need to get past hard-hard-hard-right Republican presidential primary voters without hurting himself for the general election. Plenty of members of his own party want him to walk away from immigration reform and, if possible, blow up the deal on his way out. But doing so wouldn't look good to the general public, unless Republicans could concoct a story about why it wasn't Rubio's fault. Enter Chuck Schumer, apparently. The National Review's Andrew Stiles writes:
A number of GOP aides cite Schumer’s involvement as a primary reason that they remain skeptical about the prospects for immigration reform. Some have expressed concern that Rubio, a rising star in the Republican party, walked into a trap the moment he agreed to join Schumer’s gang. Schumer may be less interested in compromise, they suggest, than in deliberately designing legislation that conservatives would be unable to support; this tactic would force Rubio to back out and thereby create a divisive campaign issue for Democrats to run on in 2014 and 2016.
Schumer, Stiles warns readers, has been known to do dirty, underhanded things like using talking points and actually campaigning against Republicans based on Republican policies. I mean, can you even imagine sneaky tactics like this?
In March 2012, Politico highlighted Schumer’s efforts “to portray Republicans as anti-women, anti-Latino, and anti-middle class” by forcing votes on politically charged items such as the “Buffett Rule” (a proposed tax on millionaires) and the Violence Against Women Act, neither a which stood a chance of becoming law.
He forced votes on substantive policies with broad public support? Holy crap! That is some next-level political assassination right there. Especially since the Violence Against Women Act ultimately did pass—scary, scary stuff there. Truly, this is someone whose involvement in bipartisan immigration reform is to be viewed with the utmost suspicion. And Marco Rubio, Stiles warns, may be too innocent and lamb-like to see the traps Schumer has laid for him. Schumer's staff may write into the final bill "loopholes, escape hatches, and land mines that Rubio’s people are completely unaware of," according to one of Stiles's sources.
Or maybe Schumer wants the reputation as a bipartisan dealmaker to position himself to succeed Harry Reid as the Senate majority leader. But because of his established record as a partisan (the nerve!), he sure will make a convenient Republican scapegoat if Rubio decides that being part of immigration reform might damage his own political prospects.