On yesterday’s show, I told you that I fear that Sen. Marco Rubio is being played on the issue of immigration. Here’s the latest con from Obama and the democrats. They get him to be the front man on their “comprehensive immigration reform,” assuring him that, as he said on several Sunday shows yesterday, any reform allowing people illegally in the country to stay while they get right with the law will be more difficult and more expensive than it would be for them to go home and get in line. All the while, they snicker behind his back. They know that as long as those undocumented democrats stay in the country, the elected democrats can chip away at any of those onerous provisions that mean Republicans and other uncool people who support old-fashioned, outdated concepts like the rule of law support and insisted upon in exchange for amnesty.

I thought these people were “in the shadows.”

If you had any doubt that I’m right, (and I don’t know why you would since you should have learned by now that you should never doubt me), consider the following, from yesterday’s Washington Post, a story by David Nakamura:

It was early one morning in December when Richard J. Durbin spotted Marco Rubio in the members-only Senate gym.

Dedicated fitness buffs, the two had become unlikely workout buddies. Now Durbin (D-Ill.) wanted to know whether Rubio (R-Fla.) would join him in another heavy lift: a fledgling bipartisan group tackling immigration reform.

“You ought to be a part of this,” Durbin, 68, told his 41-year-old colleague, according to people familiar with the conversation. “You’d be an important voice, so come hear us out.”

Dick “Eddie Haskell” Durbin is behind recruiting Sen. Rubio into these amnesty shenanigans. Need I say more? This guy is one of the phoniest, duplicitous leftist schemers. That’s how he earned the nickname “Eddie Haskell” from me in the first place, and the nickname “the pudgy huckster” from the late Steve Neal, political reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. He is legendary in his home state for his soft-spoken, avuncular demeanor which he uses quite skillfully to conceal his extreme views from gullible constituents. This is the man who plotted with radical leftwing groups to obstruct the confirmation of many of President George W. Bush’s well-qualified judicial nominees, including the scary smart, and “especially dangerous” Miguel Estrada. The left-wing, identity politics groups, People for the American Way, NARAL, and the Alliance for Justice, who pull Durbin’s strings demanded that Mr. Estrada never be permitted on the federal bench because “he is Latino” and they could not run the risk that a Republican president would appoint the first Hispanic to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In addition, Dick Durbin has shown the democrats’ cards on the issue of border security. Let’s pretend for the sake of argument that our government has any way of measuring border security, even though as we heard on the March 24 edition of The Teri O’Brien Show, they have admitted that they don’t. In a congressional subcommittee Obama administration officials testified that the new and improved “holistic” metric that Big Sis, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, promised two years ago does not exist. There is no new metric, and there recent evidence that the border is significantly less secure than we’ve been told. From the awesome Byron York in the Washington Examiner:

“According to internal reports, Border Patrol agents used the airborne radar to help find and detain 1,874 people in the Sonora Desert between October 1 [2012] and January 17 [2013],” reported the Los Angeles Times last week. “But the radar system spotted an additional 1,962 people in the same area who evaded arrest and disappeared into the United States.”

That means officers caught fewer than half of those who made the crossing in that part of Arizona. If those results are representative of other sectors of the border, then everything the administration has said about border security is wrong.

We haven’t seen the “Gang of 8” proposal, but supposedly it sets the bar on border security pretty high. From The Wall Street Journal:

Immigrants in the U.S. illegally would not gain green cards under a bipartisan Senate bill until law-enforcement officials are monitoring the entire southern border and stopping 90% of people crossing illegally in certain areas, according to people familiar with the plan. …

Along the U.S.-Mexican border, 100% of the border would have to be under surveillance, and law enforcement would have to catch 90% of those who cross the border illegally at “high risk” sections—a term that people following the Senate talks did not define. In 2010, the Department of Homeland Security reported that only 44% of the border was under operational control, meaning officials had the ability to detect and block illegal activity there.

Sen. Durbin, along with his partners in crime Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) has suggested, though, that this 90% number is not a requirement that must be met before illegals get put on that vaunted “path to citizenship.” (Aside: shouldn’t that be “pathway to a green card?”) Rather, it’s a “goal.” So, in other words, it’s the typical leftwing lying lip service designed to deceive people into supporting proposals that they would never support in a million years if the truth were known. From Politico:

Sens. Chuck Schumer (N.Y.), Bob Menendez (N.J.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Michael Bennet (Colo.) disputed a report in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal that the immigrants would have to wait until law enforcement officials are stopping 90 percent of people crossing the Southern border.

According to Democratic sources briefed on the legislation, the Department of Homeland Security would need to implement a plan that achieves the 90 percent apprehension rate, but the rate itself is not a trigger and a barrier to the pathway for citizenship.

Oh, OK, then never mind.

And then, there’s this from The Liberal Death Star aka The New York Times:

As drafted, the legislation would provide as much as $3.5 billion for the Department of Homeland Security to set up a five-year border security plan. Officials must present the plan within six months, and no immigrants can gain any provisional legal status until the plan is in place. It would include a program to finish any border fencing that border agents deem necessary.

The plan must also show how the authorities will move quickly to spread technology across the border to ensure that agents can have surveillance capability along its entire length. They will also have five years to reach 90 percent effectiveness in their operations, a measure based on calculations of what percentage of illegal crossers were caught or turned back without crossing.

If, after five years, border officials have not reached the surveillance and enforcement goals, the bill establishes a border commission to advise the Department of Homeland Security on how to reach its goals, with additional financing of up to $2 billion.

Seriously, a commission? In other words, they’re admitting before this whole charade gets put into place that they have no hope of securing the border.

Senator Rubio, please don’t allow yourself to be played by the likes of Sen. Durbin and Sen. Schumer. You don’t need to do that to be able to run for president in 2016. Yesterday on ABC’s “This Week,” Sen. Jeff Sessions showed Republicans a way out of the this trap. More on that in a subsequent post.