Pollster and pro-Ted Cruz PAC Keep the Promise 1 President Kellyanne Conway and syndicated columnist Ruben Navarrette debated Ted Cruz’s and Marco Rubio’s immigration positions on Friday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “O’Reilly Factor.”
The segment began with Navarrette saying of Cruz, “where he has typically been very consistent and strong on immigration, and Marco Rubio has ironically been the one who’s been all over the map and inconsistent, and seemed to contradict himself, now those roles have reversed.”
Conway disagreed, stating that Cruz didn’t flip-flop and “Marco Rubio’s position on immigration is very clear. One of these two senators stood by Chuck Schumer and Barack Obama as part of the Gang of Eight, and one did not.” And “it’s important for us to know, that there’s something called a poison pill in the law and in legislation. Legislation, it means that you offer amendments to a bill, trying to expose what you don’t like about the bill, and ultimately, these helped to kill it. We don’t have Marco Rubio, Chuck Schumer, Barack Obama’s idea of amnesty as law today, Eric, because people like Ted Cruz stood up against it.”
Navarrette then argued, “when it suits Ted politically, he’ll be on one side. When it suits him — a different direction, he’ll be on the other side.” And “We’ve all seen those courtroom dramas where they say to the witness, ‘Are you lying then or — were you lying then or are you lying now?’ If Ted wants to go with this, and his supporters and his surrogates want to go with the idea that this was a poison pill amendment, that’s fine. All he has to confess to is that he lied back then when he said it wasn’t a poison pill amendment. When he spoke to people, when he spoke to all those groups and said that he wanted to build a path, and if the goal of the amendment was to get it to pass, either Ted lied then or he’s lying now. any supporter has to come to grips with the fear that if he lied then, he may be lying now.”
Conway, in response, said that people should read Cruz’s plan on his website, tedcruz.org. And “I hope you’re getting $500 per time you said Ted Cruz lied from someone, Ruben.”
In response to Conway later saying that Cruz “is with Jeff Sessions and Steve King on immigration.” Navarrette maintained, “there’s daylight between Jeff Sessions and Ted Cruz. Look it up, they both separate on the idea of legal immigration. Jeff Sessions proposed an amendment at one point to limit legal immigration, and Ted Cruz broke with Jeff Sessions over that, because Ted supports legal immigration. So, there’s plenty of daylight there.”
Conway argued, “the question for the voters is thus, will you be able to forgive Marco Rubio for his position on amnesty?” Navarrette argued the question becomes if people trust Cruz.
She concluded, “here’s what the Rubio people want this contest to come down to, they want us to not talk about substance. They want it…to come down to two young senators, sons of Cuban immigrants, who has more friends in the Senate, and who’s more likable.”
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