POLL: Marco Rubio jumps to the head of GOP 2016 pack

 

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Ted Cruz to Announce Presidential Bid on Monday

NBC News.com

hardnoxandfriends.com

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz will announce his presidential bid on Monday during an address at Liberty University in Virginia, NBC News confirms.

Cruz, a conservative Republican famed for his staunch opposition to the president's signature health care law and his executive actions on immigration, will become the first GOP hopeful to formally announce a White House run.

A person with knowledge of the announcement tells NBC that the senator will announce the bid during a convocation ceremony at Liberty, a Christian university in Lynchburg, Virginia.

A favorite of Tea Party activists, Cruz is known for his filibuster-like speech to protest the Affordable Care Act as a government shutdown loomed in 2013.

First elected to the Senate in 2012, Cruz previously served as the the solicitor general of Texas.

In a March NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll, 40 percent of GOP primary voters said they could see themselves supporting Cruz for president, while 38 percent said they could not see themselves backing him.

The news of Cruz's run was first reported by the Houston Chronicle late Saturday night.

America Faces Most Dangerous Two Years in 150 Years

breitbart

By Charles Hurt

If President Obama suffered a "shellacking" in the 2010 elections, then what he endured Tuesday night was nothing short of a vicious gangland beatdown the likes of which have rarely been seen before in the history of electoral politics.

This, of course, is a wonderful and well-deserved outcome. But beware: America now enters the two most dangerous years of her existence — or certainly the most dangerous since the Great Depression and possibly going all the way back to the Civil War.

Not to dismiss the promising results of Tuesday's election.

Voters clearly and forcefully rejected the party, politics and policies of President Obama. They slapped his socialist agenda back into the days of Soviet gulags, where it belongs.

His grand visions of mighty government ruling unchecked over desperate ghettos have been snuffed out.

Gone, too, were the so-called "low-information voters" who have been coaxed to the polls since 2008 on lies and false promises that the federal government would solve all their problems.

They are used up and wrung out.

Even the onslaught of threats and desperate accusations in endless emails to their Obamaphones couldn't motivate those people to the polls one more time.

Voters rejected the craven, crass and mafioso tactics of Senate Leader Harry Reid.

Voters stripped him of his baldly partisan use of the United States Senate as a graveyard for all House legislation in order to protect his Democrats from tough votes and insulate the President from reality.

The little man with giant fists got staggered by a nasty uppercut from voters even though Reid saw it coming for weeks. Now, the ex-boxer stumbles on the canvas all tangled in the ropes, waiting for the bell.

And voters also rejected the loony-toon delusions of House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi. Honestly, the woman should be running a hat and wig shop in Haight-Ashbury, selling weed and prescription pills on the side. How it is that Democrats in Congress have taken her so seriously for so long will baffle historians for decades.

The silver lining for Democrats today is now they now have the perfect excuse to bounce both of them out of leadership forever.

And this is where things get very, very dangerous for America. President Obama still has two more years left in his final term.

Already, he has demonstrated again and again that he has no regard for the constitution or the legitimacy of laws when they do not suit his agenda. He flaunts his disregard for the constitutional process, dismisses laws he doesn't like and rewrites others.

He mocks the powers of Congress. The Supreme Court has slapped him down more than any president in recent times. All of this as he tells us he is an expert on constitutional law.

Now come his very explicit threats to pass more illegal and unconstitutional presidential edicts to grant amnesty to illegal aliens already in the United States. This, in turn, will issue invitations for millions more illegals to come streaming across the border.

It will not end at immigration. Unchecked power is addictive.

Disowned by Democrats and made to feel irrelevant in this election, President Obama's enormous and unjustified ego is deeply wounded. He is frustrated and feels caged, cornered. This is when people like him are most dangerous.

Buoyant Republicans will make an effort to engage him.

But President Obama is not a listener. He is not a negotiator. He is not a learner. He will just take what he wants. It is easier that way.

Franklin D. Roosevelt's court-packing scheme during the Great Depression was nothing like the strains this president has put on Constitution. Indeed, not since the Civil War has America faced such a dire threat to her existence as a lawful, constitutional republic.

The difference in leadership between then and now could not be more striking.

To bind the union, Abraham Lincoln took an economic and political war and elevated it into something higher. He made it about emancipating slaves and won. And saved the Republic.

This president does the opposite. He got elected promising to elevate politics but instead finds unity and sows discord, often inciting racial divisions.

America's only hope today is that President Obama finally turns to the bust of Lincoln he keeps in the Oval Office and listens.

Will the Republicans take the Senate in 2014?

American Enterprise Institute

Rand Paul Wins CPAC Presidential Straw Poll

AssociatedPress

Glenn Beck on the state of the GOP

Gloves Off: GOP Establishment Goes After Tea Party

By Matthew Boyle 

falsenorthing.com

The National Republican Senate Committee, the GOP campaign arm responsible for Senate elections, has decided to use its political power to block consulting firm Jamestown Associates from receiving political work from GOP candidates or incumbents. 

Jamestown's "sin" is working with the Senate Conservative Fund, an organization that supports conservative candidates for the US Senate. 

NRSC communications staffer Brad Dayspring, a former spokesman for House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), told The New York Times on Friday, “We’re not going to do business with people who profit off of attacking Republicans. Purity for profit is a disease that threatens the Republican Party.”

Jamestown Associates has done work with the Senate Conservatives Fund (SCF), a conservative group largely responsible for the elections of Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Mike Lee (R-UT), Jeff Flake (R-AZ), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Rand Paul (R-KY), Deb Fischer (R-NE), Pat Toomey (R-PA), and Ron Johnson (R-WI), among others. Former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), who left the U.S. Senate last year to become the president of the Heritage Foundation, founded SCF.

"In a warning shot to outside conservative groups, the National Republican Senatorial Committee this week informed a prominent Republican advertising firm that it would not receive any contracts with the campaign committee because of its work with a group that targets incumbent Senate Republicans," the Times wrote. 

"Even more striking," the Times continued, "a senior official at the committee called individual Republican Senate campaigns and other party organizations this week and urged them not to hire the firm, Jamestown Associates, in an effort to punish them for working for the Senate Conservatives Fund, a group founded by Jim DeMint, then a South Carolina senator, that is trying to unseat Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, and some other incumbents up for re-election next year whom it finds insufficiently conservative."

The Times notes that a large part of the reason why SCF has drawn the ire of the GOP establishment is its endorsement of McConnell’s primary challenger, businessman Matt Bevin. McConnell’s chief of staff Josh Holmes, who is now working for the NRSC through the election, told the Times that McConnell plans to beat up SCF for being conservative like he would if it were a bar fight. “S.C.F. has been wandering around the country destroying the Republican Party like a drunk who tears up every bar they walk into,” Holmes said. “The difference this cycle is that they strolled into Mitch McConnell’s bar and he doesn’t throw you out, he locks the door.”

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O'Really: It is personal between President Obama and conservatives

Cruz: McCain Sabotaged Republicans

Breitbart-TV

Obama Balks at Boehner's Debt Ceiling Offer

breitbart

By Matthew Boyle

After House Republicans gave a little breathing room on the debt ceiling, offering a “clean” six-week increase with nothing in return, President Barack Obama rejected their plan.

Obama’s and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s decision to completely reject any offer of a compromise from House Republicans confirms what most conservatives already know: Obama will not negotiate on anything (he has said as much numerous times over the past couple of weeks) unless he faces consequences for failing to do so.

The whole point of this fight, as most congressional Republicans including House Speaker John Boehner have said, has been to expose how President Obama has never compromised on anything, always gets his way or the highway, and will not negotiate with Congress—though he will try to make deals with American rivals or enemies like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iran’s new leaders. In the process, conservatives hoped that Republicans would use their negotiating power to shred Obamacare, or at least burn parts of it.

While Obama says he would not negotiate under the circumstances of a government shutdown, or under the threat of a potential default, he has shown time and again that he will never negotiate outside of those circumstances. So, what are congressional Republicans to do? As Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin laid out in an op-ed for Breitbart News on Thursday morning, the only way to know whether President Obama will ever negotiate with Congress on anything is if the GOP in Congress stands it ground.

Obama was slipping in the government shutdown battle. His approval rating had been plummeting, down to 37 percent. Obamacare was becoming ever more unpopular, as its early implementation continued failing. Conservatives were winning the shutdown fight much more so than anyone in the establishment expected; polling data showed voters were blaming President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats as much as they are Republicans for it.

What has happened, instead? Congressional Republicans, led by Boehner and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), have blinked. They attempted to decouple the debt ceiling battle from the CR battle against Obamacare, instead of using all the leverage they have available to keep their figurative boot on the president’s throat.

They offered a six-week “clean,” no-strings-attached debt ceiling increase. On paper, and in the policy wonk world of conservatism, that negotiating tactic might have seemed like a solid strategy. Sure, Republicans would have been able to reorganize the order in which they fight their fiscal fights over the last few months of 2013, keep Wall Street from having a meltdown aimed at them and likely splitting the party as the ongoing government shutdown continues and, most importantly, they would have been able to keep the focus on Obamacare. In the process, the government would remain shut down and the song and dance of the Obama administration’s shutdown theater would continue.

But here is the problem with that logic: we do not live in a perfect world. We live in a world where, as we have already established, President Obama does not negotiate. Obama is no Bill Clinton; he is not interested in a mere deal. President Obama and Harry Reid want to fry the Republican Party and literally took the government into a shutdown—threatening a default to do so. They now refuse to take up a House-passed bill that would provide paychecks to the 3 million government employees (many of whom live paycheck to paycheck in the Obama economy) who will not be getting paid on Monday, the first scheduled payday for government employees during shutdown.

Obama is a man whose administration put barricades up to keep World War II veterans out of their open-air memorial, preventing the brave men who put their lives on the line for America from entering a memorial to their military service perhaps for the first or last time in their lives, while allowing illegal immigrants to protest across the street on the supposedly-closed National Mall. To win against someone like this, you must fight fire with fire. 

Obama actually has to believe House Republicans when they visit him to “talk.” Right now, Obama has no reason to believe Republicans will stand strong. Why should he? They have caved every other time they “negotiated” with him over the past three years since the Tea Party movement gave Boehner the speakership.

In response to Boehner’s Paul-Ryan-driven blink, what happened? That same man rejected the plan he had been saying he wanted for weeks, then added preconditions to raising the debt ceiling. Obama has stated for weeks he thinks a debt ceiling increase should not have any conditions; well, after Boehner blinked, Obama added a condition: open the government with the debt ceiling increase.

Martin sums it best in her piece on Breitbart News: “Leave it to establishment Republicans to sacrifice policy on the altar of tactics. As the partial government shutdown rolls into its second week and the so-called debt ceiling deadline draws nearer, we're beginning to see cracks in a previously unified GOP front against the Affordable Care Act.”

Now Obama knows: Republicans are willing to cave.

O'Reilly: A collapse of leadership in America

O'Reilly: The brawl continuing over ObamaCare and the gov't shutdown

O'Really: Some straight talk about the ObamaCare mess

Conservatives, Liberals and Government - Study

BrighterLife.ca

Fundamental to our understanding of democratic politics across the developed world is that conservative parties stand for relatively low levels of government spending, while those on the left of the political spectrum are prone to higher spending. A new study, released yesterday by the Montreal Economic Institute (MEI), blows a hole through that conventional wisdom.

“When you look at the behaviours of various parties over long periods of time in different governments, the pattern is that there is no pattern,” said MEI’s president and chief executive officer, Michel Kelly-Gagnon in an interview with me yesterday. “The parties that are supposed to be more in favour of big government end up spending less than we might expect. And the parties that are supposed to be fiscally conservative sometimes end up being spendthrifts.”

MEI’s study examined government spending in Canada, Quebec and the U.S., dating back to the Pierre Trudeau, Robert Bourassa and Richard Nixon administrations respectively. “In all three cases,” reads the report, “it is actually left-wing governments that most reduced the relative size of government.”

MEI reports government size as the ratio of public spending to gross domestic product.

Under Liberal Prime Ministers Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, that ratio fell by 32.5%. The current government, under the leadership of Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, drove the ratio up after the financial crisis. It has since reduced the size of government to roughly where it was when the Conservatives took office in 2006.

In the U.S., Republican President George Bush grew the ratio more than any other, by 39%. Democratic President Bill Clinton shrank it by 14.3%.

Is this simply a matter of parties running for office from the left or right, as the cliché goes, and then governing from the centre? Partly, said Kelly-Gagnon. “Parties, when they form governments, regardless of their declared ideology, have to be responsive to the economic environment.”

Context matters, Kelly-Gagnon told me. Clinton’s numbers look great because he enjoyed strong gross domestic product growth during his presidency. Harper had a financial crisis to deal with, and he therefore had to implement a level of stimulus spending that ran contrary to his party’s small government plans.

The report draws two conclusions. First, our perceptions about left- and right-wing political ideology don’t reflect the realities of the last four decades. The data tell a far more nuanced story. Second, we’re far better positioned to debate the role (and size) of government in a non-partisan fashion than we might have expected. The fact that actual decision-making hasn’t been as tied down by ideology as we may have thought means we can be more pragmatic about, for example, the austerity-stimulus debate that continues to rage around the developed world.

It’s worth a try, anyway.

Cuban-Canadian-American Ted Cruz ’16? Texas senator’s path might not be so easy

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es.wikipedia.org

By Michael O’Brien , Political Reporter, NBC News

Conservative firebrand Ted Cruz, the Texas senator whose service in office is just four months long, is considering a bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, according to a report on Wednesday by National Review.

The Texas Republican has quickly won the fervent support of grassroots conservatives since his election last November by breaking with Senate convention to aggressively challenge Democrats – and some Republicans, too. Citing anonymous sources, the National Review article suggested Cruz might look to quickly capitalize on his newfound fame, and rally conservatives behind his candidacy.

But there are significant barriers to Cruz winning the GOP nod in 2016, let alone winning the White House. Here are a few of them:

Cruz would face tough conservative competitionWhile Cruz has charmed figures ranging from conservative bloggers to former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, he could encounter a Republican primary field that would hardly cede the most conservative bloc within the GOP to Cruz. 

It’s easy to conceive of a series of Republican presidential hopefuls – Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (and possibly more) – vying for the same segment of the Republican primary vote as Cruz. Any one of those candidates will almost encounter difficulty in harnessing the political power of the Tea Party, a movement that has never been particularly well-known for acting in concert.

Fantasy vs. realityIf Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s bid for the Republican nomination in 2012 taught political observers anything, it’s that being a potential candidate is always easier to execute than being an actual candidate.

Conservatives, searching for an alternative to the establishment-backed favorite, Mitt Romney, practically begged Perry to make a late entry into the primary. They extolled his conservatism and the positive jobs situation in Texas, arguing that his record, combined with a top-notch team of consultants, would make Perry the new favorite for the GOP nomination.

Of course, things didn’t turn out that way. Perry withered under the national spotlight and the scrutiny of rival Republican candidates. Recent history is littered with examples of similar primary candidates, like Democratic hopeful Wesley Clark in 2004, and former Sen. Fred Thompson’s foray into the GOP primary of 2008. Their candidacies fizzled after having won broad acclaim at their outset.

Cruz would almost certainly face stiff opposition in a Republican primary that could expose any of his flaws as a politician. Wednesday’s National Review article cited Cruz’s experience as an award-winning debater, but his performances in those contests have never been filtered through the prism of rival campaigns or the national media.

The establishment would strike backCruz’s path to the GOP nomination would almost certainly rely on an outside strategy in which he courts conservative activists and rails against the party establishment in Washington. But would the D.C. establishment necessarily take that kind of criticism while sitting down?

In 2012, the GOP establishment quickly rallied around Romney, if only after it became apparent that there would be no other serious contenders for the presidency available. And when it seemed as though the more conservative Rick Santorum might emerge to dethrone Romney during the primaries, there were serious rumblings that GOP money men might scramble to find an alternative candidate who they regarded as more formidable versus President Barack Obama in the general election.

Given Cruz’s conservatism, it isn’t tough to imagine the GOP establishment rallying around a candidate perceived as more electable to if a Cruz candidacy  came too close to victory.

It doesn’t help Cruz that he’s forged few alliances during his short time in the nation’s capital. He most recently derided many of his congressional colleagues as “squishes,” and spoke publicly about internal Republican debates that were supposed to remain confidential. Cruz has worked with a few fellow conservatives, but two of them – Paul and Rubio – could end up being rival candidates for the GOP nomination in 2016.

Oh, Canada!The National Review article acknowledges that Cruz advisers are prepared for a legal challenge to his eligibility to serve as president, reminiscent of the “birther” attacks conservatives had leveled against Obama for much of his first term. 

At issue is Cruz’s birthplace. He was born in Calgary, Canada, the son of a Cuban refugee father and a U.S. citizen mother. Having been born outside the continental U.S., he would have to address questions about whether he is a “natural born” U.S. citizen, which the Constitution requires of a prospective president.

But even if Cruz is able to offer up all the evidence in the world of his eligibility, it’s not tough to imagine Democratic candidates and super PACs relishing in the chance to give a Republican his comeuppance, and turn the “birther” phenomenon back against a GOP hopeful. 

He’s barely a blip in the polls right nowCruz could certainly raise his national profile in the next few years, but the Texas senator hasn’t yet registered as a contender for the GOP nomination in any credible poll testing the 2016 field.

A Quinnipiac University poll at the beginning of last month found that Rubio was the slight, early favorite among Republican primary voters; 19 percent of them said they would favor the Florida senator as their nominee in 2016. And while other contenders like Paul, Walker, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell all registered some level of support, Cruz did not.

Cruz still faces the challenge of building his reputation outside of conservative, Washington-focused circles. But he still has plenty of upside, too; having been a figure on the national stage for such a short period of time, Cruz’s name ID among primary voters has virtually nowhere to go but up.

Barbara Bush Doesn't Want Jeb To Run

Breitbart-TV

Former first ladies Barbara Bush on Jeb's potential presidential run "He's by far the best qualified man, but no, I really don't. I think it's a great country. There are a lot of great families, and it's not just four families or whatever. There are other people out there that are very qualified. We've had enough Bushes."

"He'll get all our enemies, half of our friends." 

Rush: The real reason Republicans lose

wnd

By Joe Kovacs

PALM BEACH, Fla. – Radio host Rush Limbaugh says there’s a relatively simple reason why Republicans have not been able to win the presidency in the last two election cycles: they don’t have conservative candidates at the top of the ticket.

“That’s why we’re losing, because we keep nominating moderates,” Limbaugh claimed Tuesday on his top-rated national radio show.

He referred to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP nominee for the White House, as “one of the most decent men ever to run for the presidency in my lifetime and probably in many people’s lifetimes.”

“A totally decent guy,” he continued, “but four million Republicans didn’t vote in 2012. Four million fewer than did in 2008. The Republican conservative base stayed home. Had they voted, we wouldn’t be talking about Obama’s second term. There wouldn’t be one.”

Limbaugh noted: “In politics, if we had at the electoral level somebody who could articulate conservatism passionately and from the heart without a teleprompter, without notes, we wouldn’t be in this mess. People respond to it when it’s properly explained. But it’s been so castigated, besmirched, impugned that many conservatives are defensive about it.

“And now there’s a popular movement: ‘Well, we’re gonna have to moderate our stand on immigration, we have to actually maybe be for amnesty. Moderate our view on abortion and kind of forget about the social issues. We’re gonna have to forget being concerned about any kind of morality now. That’s the only way we’re gonna get re-elected. And that’s why we’re losing.”

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/03/rush-the-real-reason-republicans-lose/#ZghQYer1UGEBLI5B.99

Get 'off your ass': Boehner blasts Senate Democrats

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

firstread

By Carrie Dann, NBC News

House Speaker John Boehner addresses the ongoing sequester standoff on Capitol Hill.

Echoing the frustration of lawmakers throughout Washington hoping for a last-minute swerve to avoid impending budget cuts, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, used some PG-13 phraseology Tuesday to urge the Senate to action. "We have moved a bill in the House twice," Boehner said at a press conference Tuesday. "We should not have to move a third bill before the Senate gets off their ass and begins to do something." The refrain of urging Senate action comes from Boehner just four days before the sequestration cuts are slated to kick in. President Barack Obama will travel to Newport News, Va. this afternoon to highlight the cuts' effect on the region's shipbuilding community. He will be joined by the area's Rep. Scott Rigell, a Republican. The White House's road trips to warn of the sequester's impact have drawn criticism from foes. "He has traveled over 5000 miles the last two weeks, and we challenge him travel a mile and half and come to Capitol Hill," said Rep. Cathy McMorris Rogers of Washington on Tuesday. "Sit down with Harry Reid and urge the Senate Democrats to take action."

Boehner said Obama's event this afternoon will reduce the nation's military to a campaign "prop."
"I don't think the president is focused on finding a solution to the sequester," he said. "The president has been traveling all over the country, today by going down to Newport News in order to use our military men and women as a prop in yet another campaign rally to support his tax hikes."

Washington's sequester standoff drags on: 'Mr. President, you got your tax increase'

By Michael O'Brien, Political Reporter, NBC News

The nation’s capital was enveloped in a familiar kind of gridlock late Monday, as Republicans again demanded that President Barack Obama and Senate Democrats act first to put off $85 billion in automatic cuts slated to take effect on Friday.

“The president says we have to have another tax increase to avoid the sequester,” House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said of the hefty and indiscriminate spending cuts. “Well, Mr. President, you got your tax increase. It's time to cut spending.”

Related: Obama to govs: Push Congress to avert cuts

As Congress returned to work following a weeklong recess, the Obama administration and lawmakers appeared no closer to resolving the automatic spending cuts before their Friday deadline. While both Democrats and Republicans bemoan the cuts as potentially catastrophic for the economy and the national defense, both sides have been locked in a virtual staring match over the sequester.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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GOP fears Obama will jilt them on immigration

By Michael O'Brien, Political Reporter, NBC News

www.christianpost.com

A recurring fear has colored Republicans’ attitude toward the current immigration reform debate in Congress: President Barack Obama has no actual interest in reaching a deal, and is instead pursuing the issue to exacerbate the GOP’s problems with Hispanic voters.

Yet all of the evidence so far – whether in his speeches and or his relations with Congress – suggests he and his administration clearly want a deal that he could sign into law.

Politics, of course, play an undeniable role in the renewed effort to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws, especially given that Obama won more than 70 percent of the Latino vote in the 2012 election. Consequently, Republicans who had previously resisted any legislation that offered a pathway to citizenship for the nation’s some 11 million undocumented immigrants have now reversed course.

“The Republican Party is losing the support of our Hispanic citizens and we realize that there are many issues on which we think we are in agreement with our Hispanic citizens but this is a preeminent issue with those citizens,” Arizona Sen. John McCain, a Republican member of the bipartisan Senate group working toward an immigration accord, said bluntly upon the introduction of that proposal’s framework.

But Republicans have warily engaged the new debate over immigration with active fears that the president’s true intentions on immigration are half-hearted, at best.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who’s established himself as an outspoken conservative after just a couple of months on the job, was only the latest Republican to give voice to that fear.

“I don’t believe President Obama wants an immigration bill to pass, instead I think he wants a political issue,” he said in a speech on Wednesday, according to a report by the Houston Chronicle. ”His objective is to push so much on the table that he forces Republicans walk away from the table because then he wants to use that issue in 2014 and 2016 as a divisive wedge issue.”

It’s a fear that many of Cruz’s fellow elected Republicans appear to share.

“The question that many of us are asking, Republicans and Democrats, is he looking to play politics or does he want to solve the problem?” Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, the former GOP vice presidential nominee, asked during his Jan. 27 appearance on NBC's “Meet the Press” preceding Obama’s major policy speech on immigration.

Republicans carefully watched that speech with concerns that Obama would eventually demagogue immigration. The president generally did the opposite; he used the speech to carefully embrace the bipartisan Senate talks, while warning that the administration would have its own backup plan at the ready for congressional consideration should the Senate talks fail. He further embraced a bipartisan speech in prime time, during his State of the Union address.

“As we speak, bipartisan groups in both chambers are working diligently to draft a bill, and I applaud their efforts,” Obama said. “So let’s get this done. Send me a comprehensive immigration reform bill in the next few months, and I will sign it right away.”

But Republicans’ concerns that Obama will jilt the GOP on immigration very much inform the work toward a comprehensive reform law, and help explain part of the reason why the politics of the issue are so fraught.

When a draft of the White House’s immigration reform proposal leaked over the weekend, Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican who is helping negotiate the Senate plan, pronounced it dead on arrival in Congress.

Keep reading on firstread >>