I'm listening to the debate from last night and it's amazing how Ted Cruz can deny that he once supported amnesty for illegal immigrants even after his Rand Paul pointed out that he did and Fox played the video of him saying so on the floor of the Senate.
"If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table." Can we stop electing lawyers to the Senate?
no, he supported an amendment to remove the citizenship portion from the Go8 bill (leaving legalization) to (1) make a bad bill less bad and (2) show that citizenship was the real goal when his amendment was voted down (which it was) doesn't mean he would have voted for a bad bill just because his amendment made it less bad
The case against Ted Cruz's "natural born citizenship" is growing by the day. [rQUOTEr]Ted Cruz could be disqualified. GOP, is that worth the risk? If you attend a presidential campaign event, you may come across someone wearing colonial garb or an Uncle Sam costume or body paint. But a Ted Cruz rally in Iowa last weekend featured something possibly unprecedented: guys dressed up as Royal Canadian Mounted Police. This was not a random choice of attire. The guys in scarlet tunics were protesters, who passed out copies of Cruz's Canadian birth certificate to highlight the questions about his eligibility for the American presidency. The Constitution says the president must be "a natural born citizen" of the United States. ...[/rQUOTEr]
He said it right there in the video from the floor of the Senate that he was that he wants to provide a path legal status for the 11 million who are here illegally. Yes it is part of a larger debate but it is clear that he supported the goal of legalizing illegal immigrants. Amnesty isn't granting citizenship it's providing amnesty from current immigration law so they are legal. <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zrQyzQcmIko" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> It's beyond spin to deny what he clearly said.
Good job posting a source that requires you to pay-to-read. He will not win the nomination. Even if he does, the courts will not rule against him. It sets a dangerous precedent of making Americans born overseas ineligible.
So you're saying he lied? “Given that bipartisan agreement outside of Washington, my objective was not to kill immigration reform but to amend the Gang of Eight bill so that it actually solves the problem rather than making the problem worse.” (May 2013 interview with the Washington Examiner) “If the proponents of this bill actually demonstrate a commitment not to politics, not to campaigning all the time, but to actually fixing this problem, to finding a middle ground, that would fix the problem and also allow for those 11 million people who are here illegally a legal status with citizenship off the table. I believe that is the compromise that can pass.” (June 2013 Senate floor speech)
Seems to me that Kelly's allegation is probably the right one -- that his amendments and his arguments for the amended bill was an attempt to neuter the immigration bill. He can't just come out and say that now without catching flak, so he's dancing around it. I am confident that he's not "soft on immigration" like some would probably want to paint him as. I'd prefer it if he was. But, he's not soft on immigration, he's a politician who will maneuver and conspire to move government policy as close to his own view as possible. If that means adding poison pills and then arguing that it's a good bill even though he hates it, all just to stop something else he thinks is worse, he'll do that. The effort to reform immigration did fall apart in the end, and he played a role in it falling apart. Because Republicans were able to stymie it then, they might get another shot to reform immigration in their own vision if they happen to get a Republican president. It's a win for them.
Of course not - but to his supporters, what makes Cruz different from all the other Washington people is his integrity and all that. I think the Fact Checker has it right: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...rted-legalization-of-undocumented-immigrants/ Summary: The Pinocchio Test This is a prime example of a politician retroactively using the sausage-making process of Congress to his advantage. Cruz made a strong case in 2013 for his amendment to strip the path to citizenship from the immigration reform bill, while allowing legalization. Taking his numerous statements at face value, Cruz clearly supported some type of mechanism to grant legal status to immigrants who entered the United States illegally. Two years later, Cruz says the amendment was a tactic intended to call the Democrats’ bluff and derail the bill. There is reasonable evidence that this is indeed the case. Some of the amendments he introduced, including the citizenship one, would have pushed negotiated provisions in the bill far beyond the agreed-upon terms. Key Democrats on the committee viewed Cruz’s amendment as an effort to sabotage the bill. Yet there also is a Machiavellian element to Cruz’s gambit. Cruz positioned himself in a way so that he would appear pro-legalization if an immigration overhaul passed — or appear anti-legalization if hard-liner stances became more acceptable. We wonder how Cruz would frame his 2013 public statements now if an immigration bill had passed both houses of Congress and enjoyed popular support. Cruz’s public statements in 2013 and in 2015 are inconsistent. But we have no way of knowing whether he really was using a tactic then, or if he is using a tactic now — or both. If we had a mind-reader, either the 2013 or 2015 version of his explanation would be Pinocchio-worthy. But we can’t read minds, and it’s not The Fact Checker’s job to rate claims using speculation, so we will not issue a rating. But readers can certainly draw their own conclusions.
Nowhere does this indicate support for legalization. It just says he wants to amend the Go8 bill. Again, he said that a bill that removes citizenship would pass, not that he would vote for it (his point being that taking citizenship off the table is a nonstarter for the Go8 even if it means the bill dies).
Credible eyewitnesses believe otherwise: “I was there and I saw the debate,” Sen. Rand Paul laid in. “I saw Ted Cruz say, ‘We’ll take citizenship off the table, and then the bill will pass and I’m for the bill.’ The bill would involve legalization. He can’t have it both ways. Do you believe Rand Paul to be a liar? Is this like one of those thought riddles were you meet two guys at a crossroad, one who always tells the truth and one who always lies and you have to figure out which way to go?
At the time, he specifically said his objective was not to kill the bill. Now he argues that it was a poison pill ... to kill the bill. So which is true?
