Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus can't really explain why the official Republican response to the State of the Union and the official Republican Spanish response had
such different messages on immigration. But boy, can he babble.
Asked about the mismatched messages, Priebus first tried to pretend these were just the SOTU responses of individual Republicans:
I don't know, I mean, I think, look, I did in actuality yesterday too so that we sent it out to all the affiliates that, you know, if you can take clips. I think that in today's political world, you're going to have—and I think if you look on the Democrat side, you're going to see almost every senator, every congressman send out a press release with their response. I don't think it's that strange to have multiple people giving multiple responses.
But why not mention immigration directly in the official English-language response? This is a case where the Republicans had two official responses, and the Spanish-language one mentioned immigration and the English-language one sort of dog-whistled for the base without addressing it directly. Why not talk about immigration in English?
Um, because I think that the president's kind of screwed things up in regard to immigration reform, by overreaching, by taking his executive action, and I think he, by his own ...
Q: Wouldn't that be why you bring it up in the response?
Priebus: Well, I mean, you know what, I think we've been talking about this executive amnesty action that the president's taken illegally for a long time, and I think until that gets resolved, I think it's very difficult to go back and conduct any other kind of immigration reform. Look, I'm not the policy guy ...
Republicans can't talk about immigration reform until Obama's executive action "gets resolved," or rather blocked, defunded, repealed, killed. But defunding said executive action is a major Republican priority right now. It's just that they refused to talk about that given a national platform to do so.
Yeah, it makes absolutely no sense. But Reince got in a few of his key phrases and he blamed Obama, so he probably doesn't count it as much of a loss as the average person watching him blather would.