“Amnesty” was supposed to be an easy issue for Ted Cruz in the Republican primary, but Donald Trump and Marco Rubio have mucked it all up for him. Immigration policy is extremely complex, but the failed bipartisan effort in 2013 to pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill created a symbolic fault line dividing Republicans who support eventual citizenship for unauthorized immigrants from those who don’t. For GOP primary purposes, Rubio falls on the wrong side of that line, Cruz does not. Rubio led the fight for that bill, Cruz led the fight to kill it.

But for reasons I examined at some length here, Cruz set a trap for himself. In trying to shatter the immigration reform coalition back then, he introduced legislation that would’ve stripped the citizenship guarantee from the larger bill. Immigrants would’ve ended up with legal status, but never citizenship. To moot Cruz’s advantage on the issue Rubio is now arguing, with some success, that these positions are practically indistinguishable.

A few things are going on here:

1. Many political professionals (operatives, reporters, commentators) who understand legislative politics extremely well are playing dumb at Rubio’s behest. They know Cruz opposed the 2013 bill, and led the fight to kill it, but are sidelining their own procedural expertise because Rubio has a good opposition research team, or because it makes good television, or for some other reason.

2. Cruz is trying to furnish his reputation as both a pristine conservative and a guy who doesn’t play slippery Washington games simultaneously, when it’s clear he played a slippery Washington game in service of killing amnesty. He can’t have it both ways.