The New York Times reported on Tuesday that several conservative advocacy groups financed and directed by a few of the Republican Party's mainstays have been running ads applauding Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) for his efforts on the Senate's comprehensive immigration reform bill. The ad campaigns come as many Tea Partiers and conservative commentators, among whom Rubio had been a favorite, have begun to turn against the Florida senator for supporting a path to citizenship for the nation's undocumented. Watch one of the ads below.
"Thank him for keeping his promise, and fighting to secure the border," a narrator says in an ad appearing on Florida television and paid for by the conservative American Action Network. Even before embarking on that ad campaign in Florida, according to the Times, the ANA had already spent almost three-quarters of a million dollars on pro-reform commercials featuring Rubio. Another ad paid for by Americans for a Conservative Direction, a group headed by former Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi and other top Republicans, asks Iowa voters to "stand with Marco Rubio to end de facto amnesty." And the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, an advocacy group run by the billionaire Koch brothers, picked Orlando as the site of its annual conference, in a move thought to be meant as a gesture of support for the Florida senator.
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Rubio, a member of the "Gang of Eight" senators who crafted the immigration reform legislation, irritated many of his peers on the team when he repeatedly said - after the group had presented their bill - that he would not vote for it unless it did more to secure the US-Mexico border. But after a "border surge" amendment was tacked on at the last minute which allotted some $46 billion for border surveillance and apprehension technologies and manpower, Rubio got on board. When the bill passed the Senate with 68 votes, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) promptly dismissed hopes that he might introduce it in the House. Supporters of it hope it could be introduced later in tandem with the conservative, single-issue immigration bills currently being churned out by House Republicans.
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But among some of the most hardline conservatives whose enthusiastic support helped him win election to the Senate, Rubio's embrace of the path to citizenship for the undocumented has earned him a reputation as a turncoat. Glenn Beck called him "a piece of garbage" on his radio show. At a rally against immigration reform called by Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) in late June, Tea Partiers booed the mere mention of Rubio's name. Signs there read "Rubio RINO" (Republican In Name Only) and "Rubio Lies, Americans Die", according to the Washington Post. And a senior research fellow from the conservative Heritage Foundation, Robert Rector, criticized him at length in a speech, declaring, "Marco Rubio has not read his own bill."
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Critics from these quarters challenge the belief held by most of the GOP's senior members and strategists that the shrinking white majority means the Republican Party is facing a "demographic death spiral", as Senator Lindsey Graham (R- S.C.) put it. The GOP lost the 2012 elections, say the critics, not because they didn't attract enough of the Hispanic vote, but rather because they didn't do enough for white voters. MSNBC reports that radio commentator Rush Limbaugh has said he believes the GOP lost because white voters "they didn't think the Republican Party was conservative enough." Another social conservative leader, Phyllis Schlafly, told a radio host that "the people the Republicans should reach out to are the white votes, the white voters who didn't vote in the last election and there are millions of them."
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