Rubio is preparing to embrace the most significant measure of his young political career. Rubio goes all-in on immigration bill

Marco Rubio is preparing to go all in to support sweeping immigration legislation, offering himself up as the public face of a bill that will split the Republican Party — but that his allies hope will propel him to the front of the GOP presidential sweepstakes.

After offering lukewarm support until now, Rubio is preparing to fully embrace a measure that is the most significant of his political career so far. The gambit could pay off in spades by crowning a leading presidential contender in 2016, or it could permanently damage the Republican’s brand with conservatives.


Rubio is planning a media blitz to promote the bill — which is expected to be released early next week — making the rounds on all of the Sunday political talk shows starting this weekend, wooing skeptical conservative radio hosts and pitching the plan to Spanish-language news outlets. The campaign is aimed at building public support for the far-reaching immigration bill that will dominate Capitol Hill’s attention for much of the year.

( PHOTOS: Marco Rubio’s career)

“Obviously, we’ll be informing the public, and we’ll want everyone to know everything that’s in the bill,” Rubio told POLITICO Thursday. “We want everyone to know as much of what’s in the bill as possible, and we will use every opportunity we have to communicate that.”

Behind the scenes, the potential 2016 aspirant has already launched a lobbying campaign to convince conservatives that the plan will be tough on the border. The goal is to assuage GOP concerns over the pathway to citizenship that would be offered to the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants, allowing them to apply for citizenship after 13 years as the new enforcement measures take effect.

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The Florida Republican has privately briefed individual GOP senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee — including conservative skeptics John Cornyn of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah — about the soon-to-be-unveiled proposal, according to sources familiar with the matter. His staff has pitched the plan to conservative thought leaders, including at the National Review and Wall Street Journal editorial board as well as the columnist Charles Krauthammer, sources say.

And after being rebuffed in his bid for extensive hearings on the bill before the Judiciary Committee, the senator wants to launch his own public hearing process of sorts to allow Republican senators to question expert witnesses about the plan, a move aimed at alleviating conservative fears that the plan will be jammed through Congress with little public airing.

( PHOTOS: Pols react to immigration deal)

Far from dropping out of the group, as some suspected after his tepid comments recently, Rubio will essentially become its most prominent salesman, effectively putting his political capital — and presidential ambitions — on the line in the process. With momentum behind the push, Rubio clearly has calculated it makes more sense for him to fully embrace the effort, rather than run away from it and potentially kill the measure just as it is introduced.

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Or, as one Senate Democratic aide put it: “In poker terms, he has gone all in.”

The hurdles for actual passage of an overhaul remain high — particularly among skeptical conservatives — and it’s far from clear whether the Gang of Eight can remain united during the legislative process in the Senate. In particular, Rubio is not ruling out voting for amendments that lack the support of the rest of his group.

( Also on POLITICO: Immigration talk is local)

Lee, the tea-party-backed Utah Republican, said he told Rubio it made more sense to move immigration legislation in separate pieces, rather than in one massive bill.

“What I told Marco was if we can proceed with this in segments, it would be a lot easier to get it passed, and it would be a lot easier for people like me — people in both Houses and both political parties — to vote for it,” Lee said Thursday. “I see no reason why you have to lump everything in one 1,500-page bill and say, ‘It’s all or nothing.’”

Rubio — who initially advocated moving immigration in individual pieces — joined the bipartisan group in January to assemble the comprehensive bill, which would dramatically rewrite U.S. visa laws for high-skilled and low-skilled workers, add new protections to the border and allow illegal immigrants to apply for citizenship after 13 years.

Recently, Rubio has said little publicly, allowing his fellow Republicans in the group — Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina — to make their own cases for the immigration effort. Before Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and other negotiators appeared on the Sunday shows a couple weeks back, Rubio’s office blasted out a statement insisting that “no final agreement” had yet been reached on the proposal, calling for extensive hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the bill, which he simply called a “starting point.”

The cautionary statement privately irked some of the group members, and spawned a round of media stories questioning whether Rubio was fully committed to the effort. But since then, the group has been narrowing its differences — and Rubio has sought to convince his allies on the right that the proposal doesn’t amount to blanket amnesty for illegal immigrants. His chief of staff, Cesar Conda, sent a series of tweets Thursday characterizing as onerous the pathway to citizenship in the plan.

Rubio spokesman Alex Conant wouldn’t discuss the senator’s current outreach efforts, and he declined to comment on his media blitz after a deal is officially reached. But Conant pointed to the Florida Republican’s initial media blitz when the group reached broad agreement on the principles of an immigration overhaul in January and noted “we’ll do whatever we can to explain the proposal and make sure everybody clearly understands” it.

After calling for extensive hearings before Judiciary, a single hearing appears the most likely outcome. On Thursday, Rubio instead stressed that votes in the committee won’t occur until the first week of May, meaning the legislative text will be available for about four weeks. And to satisfy conservatives who are demanding thorough hearings, he wants to hold public meetings in which Republican senators could actually question experts about the effects of the bill.

“What I’m pleased about is between the day it’s introduced and the day that the amendment process begins there will be weeks,” Rubio said. “People will have close to four weeks to review it, come up with amendments and ideas on how to improve it. And I’m excited about that.”

But Rubio is remaining cagey on a key question facing the group: whether he would stay united with the group to defeat amendments aimed at dramatically changing areas of the carefully constructed compromise. Senators in the gang say they must stay united in order to keep the core of the measure intact, even if that means voting against amendments they otherwise would support.

That could put Rubio in a jam, as he tries to maintain a staunchly conservative voting record ahead of a possible presidential run in 2016. Asked if he would join with the group to defeat controversial amendments, Rubio said: “I don’t think that is the game plan. I think the game plan is any amendments or any ideas that make the bill better that actually improve the product is something we would be open to.”

But he added that amendments designed to “undermine” the bill “for purposes of seeing its demise” he would “argue against.”

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), a chief negotiator in the group, said the negotiators “need to stick to the substance of our basic agreement.”

“Our goal is to produce a bill that we stand by and to vote in a united fashion against amendments which would destroy the balance,” Durbin said Thursday. “We are going to face a lot of amendments, and our adversaries are going to try to break down our unity. It’s going to be tough. There are going to be amendments that I’m sure I’ll vote against which I would otherwise vote for.”

Still, the proponents of the plan need Rubio since conservative activists and lawmakers tend to give him the benefit of the doubt more than they do with Graham or McCain, two longtime deal makers. And if Rubio were to abandon the effort, the measure would undoubtedly shed GOP support and its chances would dim in the House.

“If he gets off, I’d be surprised,” Graham said Thursday. “And if he got off, I’d be surprised if I stayed because we think pretty much the same.”

Carrie Budoff Brown contributed to this report.