The establishment media won’t tell you this Tuesday, but the Republican Party civil war is over and the establishment lost. Both of the remaining front-runners, Trump and Cruz, are outsiders, and the insider, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) is history.
Megyn Kelly, call your agent. Your lame horse cannot finish the race.
When Jeb Bush left the presidential race last week after two humiliating out-of-the-running finishes in New Hampshire and South Carolina, the open borders wing of the Republican Party establishment all ran to the Rubio lifeboat. In their haste, they did not notice the Rubio lifeboat — so sad!–had gaping holes in it.
What the establishment media will not tell you after the Rubio campaign follows Bush, Kasich, Christie, and ten others into the history books is that all of them had one thing in common: none of them offered a bold or convincing program for ending our nation’s catastrophic 30-year experiment with open borders. Only Trump and Cruz have done that, and only they have survived the “epidemic of voter anger.”
Have you noticed how quickly the media rallied around “voter anger” as the explanation for the anti-establishment mood of the 2016 electorate? The genius of this label is that it allows the pundits from answering the obvious question—why are people so angry? It suggests that voters rejecting establishment candidates are behaving like children throwing a temper tantrum.
No. That’s not what is happening. Sovereign citizens are waking up and saying, “Enough, already!”
But Marco Rubio didn’t get that memo or didn’t read it. Rubio has been too busy concocting still one more smokescreen defense of his 2013 co-authorship and steadfast support of the infamous “Gang of Eight” Senate amnesty plan. In fact, even today, three years later, he has not yet fully repudiated it.
Rubio’s latest explanation of why that 2013 amnesty bill failed, offered in the debate before the South Carolina primary, is that after it passed the Senate, “the House refused to take it up.” Duh! The Gang of Eight bill passed the Senate with a majority of Republican senators voting AGAINST the bill – an embarrassing fact hardly reported by the media. It was NEVER a Republican immigration reform plan; it was a Democrat open borders plan that Rubio was suckered into supporting.
Facing a broad grassroots rebellion over the Gang of Eight amnesty bill, the Republican leadership in the House was smart enough to bury the dead skunk in the back yard. They began talking about immigration reform as a series of “small bills,” but certain Democrat rejection in the Senate blocked meaningful action.
Yet, Rubio’s stupid support of the Democrats’ Gang of Eight bill had been tattooed on his forehead, and he never had the tattoo removed. In fact, Rubio, like other Republican establishment candidates, still clings to its main, devious feature—amnesty now, enforcement later.
And THAT, my friends, is the main reason Republican voters are angry—not just at Rubio but at all establishment candidates. Two years after Republicans won control of both houses of Congress, they have yet to send Obama a Republican plan for securing the borders and have instead continued to fund the existing open borders status quo. And that is why the two “last man standing” contenders are two outspoken critics of open borders, not the establishment apologists for national suicide.
After Bush’s crash and burn, Rubio became the establishment’s lifeboat to survive the populist tsunami. Ooops. It’s now time for Plan B – or actually, it is now “Plan X.”
Plan X calls for co-opting Donald Trump: the establishment hopes he can become a Trojan Horse. Once inside the gates, he can reveal himself as the “deal-maker” who can “work across the aisle” to “get things done.” In their fanciful fantasy, now being crafted by turnaround exerts, Trump can engage in symbolic acts to please the troops while expanding legal immigration, legal guest worker programs, and foreign aid to Mexico.
The really good news is, Republican voters now have a real choice between two “outsiders.” In the next four months they will decide which one is the best hope for reversing the course of a ship of state heading toward bankruptcy and cultural suicide. Marco Rubio will not be one of those two candidates.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is hated by the Washington establishment of both parties because he actually has a record to prove his conservative principles. He fought on the Senate floor for conservative principles, and they hate him for that– for repeal of Obamacare, for secure borders, for defunding Obama’s unconstitutional executive orders.The other candidate riding the “tsunami of populist anger” is, we all know, Donald Trump. Both candidates have tapped into the public anger, but they did not create it– the establishment did by its foolish policies.
Whatever the outcome of this contest, Americans are guaranteed of having a clear choice in November. That is new, and that is progress.
Tom Tancredo is the founder of the Rocky Mountain Foundation and founder and co-chairman of Team America PAC.
Tom represented Colorado’s sixth congressional district in the United States House of Representatives from 1999 to 2009, and he is a former presidential candidate.
He is the author of In Mortal Danger: The Battle for America’s Border and Security.
