Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) on Wednesday said that the language conservatives use to discuss immigration has kept the GOP from moving on immigration reform legislation.
“We’ve been somewhat trapped by rhetoric and words and amnesty is a word that’s trapped us,” Paul said during a call organized by immigration reform supporters, as recorded by the Wall Street Journal. “We’re trapped in a word that means different things to different people. … I really think that some of it is we’re trapped in this rhetoric and we have to get beyond that.”
Paul says that he supports immigration reform, but he voted against the comprehensive Senate bill.
On Wednesday, he reiterated his support for reform, and said that he would need more assurances that the border is secure.
“I’ve always said I’m for it, I just want to be part of the process,” he said. “I don’t feel that anybody really wanted my vote because they never asked me what I thought.”
Some have posited that Cantor’s support for immigration reform, even though he blocked the House from taking up the Senate bill, contributed to his defeat in Tuesday’s primary.
Paul warned against jumping to conclusions about what led to Cantor’s demise.
“There are a lot of issues and reasons why people turned out,” he said. “I think it’s a mistake to paint it and say that one issue decided this.”
He did suggest that Cantor’s negative ads didn’t help his primary campaign.
“It’s complicated with local races, and some people, myself included, think you can go too far negative and may have increased the name ID of a lesser-known candidate, who had a lot of popular things to say about other issues,” Paul said.
I exercised my magical Powers of the Internets (at thesaurus.com) and was able to come up with the following solutions for Rand’s “Amnesty” problem:
forgiveness, immunity, absolution, repreive, condonation, dispensation, acquital, mercy, release, exculpation.
Unfortunately, they all sound like something Christ would do for no-good-niks, so the Tea Baggers won’t be interested.
Hell, if he used “exculpation” he wouldn’t have to worry about the “meaning different things to different people” since no one in the Tea Party would know what it means.
Well yeah, I think many Americans actually do feel “trapped by the rhetoric”
especially the rhetoric of the past six fricking years.
Aqua could do his part to ameliorate it by SingTFU.
Reagan was the Amnesty Granter in chief.
Obama’s proposal is a long, tough process to citizenship. Most of these people would prolly just settle for guest worker status.
Sucks that your wordsmiths ran with that to be ambiguous when fighting the Dems on it and now you can’t support anything because anything you say falls into that trap.
Remember when Lil’ Rand tried to rewrite the definition of “plagiarism”? Yeah, that didn’t work either.