Florida paper: Is Rubio still 'on board' with immigration bill or not?

by Matthew Boyle 6 Jun 2013, 11:11 AM PDT
breitbart.com

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The Tampa Bay Times is asking whether Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) still supports the “Gang of Eight” immigration legislation.

“Sen. Marco Rubio has for months positioned himself as the focus of the immigration debate, the reason why a bill has gotten as far as it has,” The Times’ Washington Bureau Chief Alex Leary wrote on Thursday morning. “But now he's managed to create an aura of mystery: Is he on board or not?”

Leary then quoted several advocates of the bill, including the executive director of the George Soros-funded National Immigration Forum (NIF), bashing Rubio for becoming all of a sudden somewhat flimsy in his support for the bill.

“I can understand the value of being hard to pin down,” Ali Noorani, NIF’s executive director, said. “But Sen. Rubio is at his best when he has a clear strategy on how he is going to build consensus. You can't build consensus in one place and then go around the corner and try to undermine it.”

NIF is the group behind the Astroturf evangelical group, Evangelical Immigration Table (EIT), pushing the bill and trying to give off the impression of evangelical support for this piece of legislation. EIT has admitted to Breitbart News it does technically legally exist, and that NIF--which receives millions of dollars in funding from leftwing billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Institute--“facilitates” its activities.

Rubio’s support for the bill has come into question as of late, as this week he said he would vote against it in its current form and a high-ranking Senate aide told Breitbart News that Rubio is looking for a way out of the Gang of Eight.

Rubio’s spokesman Alex Conant has not responded to Breitbart News’ requests for comment before or after that story published.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Governm...on-bill-or-not