Lunchtime Must-Read: Jonathan Chait: Dreamers Have Destroyed GOP Immigration Strategy

Jonathan Chait: Dreamers Have Destroyed GOP Immigration Strategy: “After the 2012 election, Marco Rubio tried to craft himself…

…as the leader of a pro-immigration-reform Republican Party. That effort has capsized, pulling Rubio’s standing with conservatives down along with it. Now Rubio is refashioning himself as the leader of a restrictionist Republican Party…. The newest iteration of Rubio is the opposite of the figure he and party leaders envisioned last year. The transformation ought to terrify them…. Of course, the 2016 campaign has hardly begun…. The trouble for Republicans is that the political theater created by the Dreamers is not going to stop. They can try their best to control officially sanctioned media debates, but the Dreamers are staging debates without permission, endlessly highlighting the cruelty of the Republican stance. It is a strategy for which the Republicans so far have no answer. The symbolic denouement of Rubio’s immigration debacle may well be an angry old man brandishing his cane at young Dreamers.