Kristol says Rubio is 'a friend.' | POLITICO Screen grab and AP Photo Kristol to Rubio: 'Walk away'

The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol has some advice for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) on the Senate’s immigration reform bill: Walk away.

“He should walk away from it,” Kristol said Tuesday on “The Laura Ingraham Show.” “He should say, I made a good faith effort, but you know what, this is not a piece of legislation.”


The Weekly Standard editor told Ingraham that Rubio — who Kristol said he considers “a friend” — should step away from the “big government bill.” Instead, immigration reform should be dealt with issue-by-issue rather than by one comprehensive piece of “bad legislation,” Kristol said.

( QUIZ: Do you know Marco Rubio?)

“Think of the trust you have to have in bureaucracy to make all this work,” he said. “There’ll be certifications and border security, there’ll be tests of whether people paid back taxes. … If you like Obamacare, you should like this immigration bill. And I honestly think conservatives should oppose it on those grounds alone.”

Kristol said Republicans and the Florida senator should wait on tackling immigration until conditions are more favorable for the party — for example, in 2015, when he said there will be more Republicans in Congress or in 2017, when “perhaps there’s a Republican president.”

“I’m a liberal, as you know, on immigration reform. I was more liberal than you were, I think, in ’06, ’07. I’ve got to say, I couldn’t vote for this bill,” Kristol said. “I just don’t think it’s good conservative governance, and I don’t think there’s any need to compromise with Chuck Schumer and Barack Obama at this point. There’s no crisis.”

And, Kristol added, “the impulse that we have to act or that doing something foolish is better than doing nothing is always a mistake, and particularly a mistake in immigration. Because once you legalize, you legalize. It’s done.”

Ingraham, meanwhile, wrapped up the interview by telling Kristol that “as a friend, you’ve got to tell [Rubio] to pull back from the cliff.”

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