'The cake was baked from the start'
NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland – U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, strongly suggested the fix was in from the beginning by GOP leaders to sabotage the fight against Obama’s amnesty, saying, “The cake was baked from the start.”
The senator said that was evident to him immediately when GOP leaders chose a bill funding the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, as the vehicle to try to stop the amnesty President Obama granted to five-million illegal immigrants by executive order in November.
Cruz made the observations while speaking to a small group of reporters across the street from the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, on Thursday.
WND kicked off the conversation by asking: Why won’t GOP leaders fight amnesty?
If the GOP leadership had really wanted to stop amnesty, Cruz explained, they would not have attached the provision defunding Obama’s amnesty to the DHS funding bill.
They would have attached it to a bill defunding the Environmental Protection Agency, “or some other non-essential agency.”
He described such agencies as “hostages the GOP could afford to hold.”
Cruz insisted GOP leaders knew all along that rank-and-file Republicans would never vote to defund the DHS during a time of increasing terror threats at home and abroad.
Instead, he said, they chose a strategy that was clearly designed to fail.
Cruz said he is optimistic in the long run but pessimistic in the short term about stemming the flow of illegal immigrants.
He is pessimistic because “GOP leadership joined with (Senate Minority Leader) Harry Reid, D-Nev., to pass amnesty.” Cruz was referring to the move this week by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to offer a “clean” bill funding the DHS, which meant dropping the provision in the bill that would have defunded implementation of Obama’s amnesty.
Instead, McConnell offered a separate bill to defund amnesty, which is headed to near-certain defeat because Republicans will not be able to muster the 60 Senate votes needed to avoid a Democratic filibuster.
But Cruz said he is optimistic about the issue in the long run because of the ever-increasing public support behind the need to secure the Southern border.
The senator insisted, if lawmakers were to focus on areas of bipartisan agreement, immigration reform legislation would “sail through Congress.”
He identified the top two areas of bipartisan agreement as securing the border and “streamlining” the process for legal immigration.
But instead of looking for genuine progress on the issue, Cruz said, Obama and his fellow Democrats have used immigration as a “partisan cudgel,” purely for political purposes.
The senator implied Obama is not serious about immigration reform and doesn’t really care about the plight of immigrants, but would rather use them and the issue as a political weapon to increase his power.
As proof of that, the senator noted how the president had a “supermajority” of Democrats in Congress during his first two years in office and could have passed any immigration reform legislation he wanted, and Republicans would have been powerless to stop him.
Instead, Obama “did zero. Nothing.”
Cruz flatly accused Obama of using the Hispanic community for political purposes, saying simply, “It’s wrong.”
