For a guy who supposedly took a major risk in voting for the Senate's immigration reform bill, Marco Rubio sure has been
awfully quiet:
After relentlessly defending an ambitious overhaul of the nation's immigration laws for months, Marco Rubio didn't respond when House Republican leaders last week trashed it as a "flawed…massive, Obama-care like bill."
The Florida senator's office, which churned out countless press releases touting his interviews and speeches about the legislation, hasn't said a word about immigration since the Senate passed the bill on June 27.
The thing that seems weird about this is that if Rubio was ever going to get any credit for passing immigration reform, it was going to be because he was able to build enough Republican support to get a bill through the House. The question wasn't whether Rubio's support was the key for getting a bill through the Senate—it was whether he could lead Republicans towards reform.
Maybe remaining silent is part of some sort of eleventy-billion dimensional chess to accomplish that goal, but the simple answer is probably the right one: Rubio is scared to death of the GOP right-wingers who propelled him to victory in 2010. Actually, come to think of it, given how he's backtracking on his support for new anti-choice legislation, maybe Rubio is scared to death of anyone who disagrees with him.