"Well first of all, we have developed the idea in enough detail that people knew what was in it, and when I first announced the idea immediately Democrats and the left criticized me. The same people who are now applauding the president for doing something similar. And so that exposes the hypocrisy behind it.
The second point is..if you're a responsible policy maker, you just don't rush out a piece of legislation that potentially affects the lives of 800,000 people that deeply affects the immigration laws of this country. You have to be careful, you have to have answers to every question. If I rushed out a piece of legislation that's not ready, if I don't have every answer to every question that's going to be raised about that bill, it loses credibility from the onset. So I will continue to approach it as a responsible policy maker.
Look, if I wanted a talking point, if I wanted something to use in November we could have cobbled something together and rolled it out...
Probably very true, but then legislators don't usually go around talking for months about a bill they're going to propose - they generally roll it out when it's ready to be rolled out. The politics works on both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Back on MTP, host David Gregory tried to move on to the bigger story on immigration - which is, will Congress ever get around to passing a comprehensive bill that addresses all of the issues around this volatile subject?
Gregory asked Rubio if such a major plan -which hasn't been seriously discussed since being derailed in the Senate give years ago when Republicans like George W. Bush and John McCain were pushing for it - be passed that includes granting a path to citizenship of some if not most of the estimated 11.5 million undocumented immigrants (Neither Obama nor Rubio's proposals would do that)?
GREGORY: I'm not able to get a definitive answer from you, which is can anyone become legal without first going home? This is going to be the brass tacks question here-
RUBIO:But, when?
GREGORY: - when you get to immigration reform.
RUBIO:Yeah. But again, the answer to that question depends on the environment in which it's being answered. And in this current environment, in this current environment, the options that we have available today to deal with 12 million people, is very limited. Because people are frustrated that our immigration laws are not being enforced, and we don't have a functional legal immigration system that people?
Rubio went on to reiterate his opposition to the DREAM Act, which he says is "too broad."That bill would codify into law reforms similar to those Obama enacted last week. The last vote on the DREAM Act came during the lame-duck session of Congress in December of 2010, where it received 55 votes in the Senate,
normally more than enough to pass, but generally not in the current Senate, where 60 votes are required to bypass a Republican filibuster.
Amongst Latinos, the DREAM Act is much more popular than whatever Rubio was ever going to propose. According to a Latino Decisions poll, 82 percent support the DREAM Act vs. 13 percent who supported Rubio's would-be legislation.
Although Rubio never proposed a bill, his good friend in the Miami Congressional delegation, Republican David Rivera, recently introduced an alternative to the DREAM Act in the House. His bill would
grant non-immigrant status to the children of illegal immigrants living in the United States illegally provided they entered the country before they were 16 and lived in the country for five consecutive years. Like the DREAM Act being promulgated by Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin, Rivera's legislation also requires pursuit of a four-year college degree.
Queried about his past, including the controversial use of a Republican Party of Florida credit card that he used for personal expenditures, Rubio said he had a good answer for that - and described how he's concerned that every word is unfairly scrutinized when appearing on national television.
You know, I think your opponents want to turn anything into a liability. This show, as we speak, there are bloggers standing by their computers, and fact checkers and others, that want to use any word I say against us or in the future. And that's one of the things I discuss in the book is how everything you do in politics, even if you may think it doesn't look bad, will be put together and packaged in the worst possible way in the future, and be viewed through a lens very different from the one at the time that you're doing it.
So what I talk about in the book is I have made decisions in the past that, if I had a chance to do differently, I would. You raised the credit card issue. You know, at the end of the day, I have a good explanation for all of that. But that doesn't mean that's the way it's going to be covered, and that's not the way it's going to be portrayed. And then there's a lesson there that, in politics, especially the higher you go, perception is often reality, and you have to be sensitive to that when you're involved in politics.
