Senator Rubio's people need to talk to Senator Rubio's people about the senator's principles regarding character assassination.
The past 48 hours have made clear that there is a severe disconnect between what the senator claims to believe and what his supporters are saying in their attacks on organizations critical of the Senate immigration reform bill.
There was Rubio on ABC's This Week program Sunday, taking the principled stand. He expressed both understanding for those who criticize the bill and dismay at the attacks on them.
"I understand why they're opposed to it, I really do," said Rubio. "I mean, we have the most generous country in the history of the world, whose immigration laws have been taken advantage of. You have an administration claiming that there's not a problem, that the border is already secured , when everyone knows it's not. And people are frustrated by this. And to top it all off, when you mention any of these things, you're accused of being anti-immigrant or anti-Hispanic."
But on Friday, there was a group led by Mario Lopez of the Hispanic Leadership Network, which has close ties to Rubio and touts him on its website, conducting a conference call to attack the Center for Immigration Studies, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and NumbersUSA for "poisoning" the immigration policy discussion.
It was the second Sunday disconnect in a row for Rubio. Last week he caused a ruckus when he told the Spanish-language news program Al Punto that the Senate immigration bill prioritized legalization of illegal immigrants over border security. Previously he had assured English-speaking audiences that his top priority was border security.
Now Rubio's problem involves a conflict of messages with Mario Lopez.
Earlier this year Lopez accused CIS and FAIR of being "nativist" for their resistance to comprehensive immigration reform. On Friday, he tried to place them off limits for conservatives.
"Conservatives ought to be careful and watch out who they are getting their political advice from," Lopez said, according to a story by the Spanish-language news agency EFE.
The most complete account of the conference call and the ongoing smear campaign that I have found was by Matthew Boyle at Breitbart.com.
The conference call continued a line of attack that was the subject of a February story in the Washington Post. According to the Post, Rubio aides brought Lopez to a meeting with GOP Senate staffers where Lopez attacked CIS, FAIR and NumbersUSA.
"Lopez distributed literature about the groups' backgrounds and connections," the Post's Peter Wallsten reported. The story also revealed that when Lopez repeated his attacks at another meeting, this one hosted by Grover Norquist, he received some indignant push-back.
According to the Post story:
Hans von Spakovsky, a former Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration who now works at the conservative Heritage Foundation, spoke up to defend the credibility of the Center for Immigration Studies.
"I haven't heard folks take on the substantive arguments CIS is making and saying why they're wrong," said von Spakovsky, who declined to discuss details of what happened in the off-the-record meeting. "Instead you just get these scurrilous attacks."
The aim of the Lopez campaign, which has been joined by Norquist minion Josh Culling, has been to condemn CIS, FAIR, and NumbersUSA for the excesses of John Tanton. Tanton is the controversial ophthalmologist and environmentalist from rural Michigan who had a role in the founding of all three organizations.
Tanton has long been the central target in a smear campaign that focuses on some intemperate and insensitive comments he made decades ago. I have reported extensively about the campaign, for example, on pages 16-21 of this report. The report includes this observation about Tanton:
But the small-town doctor from Northern Michigan combines relentless organizational energies with a provincial temperament and a tin ear for the sensitivities of immigration. In an arena that requires the ability to frame issues in a way that broadens consensus, he sometimes speaks with a free-wheeling bluntness that can upset even those who admire him. Some say that Tanton has shown a tendency to be unnecessarily provocative, a tendency that some have seized upon to change the topic from immigration to Tanton himself.