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Flordia Senator Marco Rubio announced tonight
that he is suspending his campaign after losing his home state to
Republican rival Donald Trump. (Photo by Angel Valentin/Getty Images)
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Losing his home state to Donald Trump by nearly 20 percentage points, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has stopped his presidential campaign,. It’s a disappointing end for Rubio, who was the Republican Party’s best hope for winning the general election, and for expanding the GOP tent to younger voters and minorities. But for Rubio supporters like myself, there is no time to grieve, because the hour is late, and there is only one option left for conservatives to win the White House.
Neither Trump nor Kasich are conservatives
Rubio has long been hammered on the right for his association with the Gang of Eight immigration reform bill. But as Jim Geraghty noted in National Review, Rubio’s voting record is that of a down-the-line conservative. The American Conservative Union has been rating members of Congress based on their voting records for decades; Rubio has a lifetime ACU rating of 98 percent. Other vote-scorers arrive at the same result.
Trump may have adopted a right-wing position on immigration, but his economic views have more in common with Democrats than Republicans: his long-standing support of single-payer health care; his opposition to free trade; his support for corporations deploying government power to seize homeowners’ property; and on and on.
John Kasich claims he is a conservative, but in Ohio he has been an enthusiast for expanding government-run health care, in the form of Medicaid. The GOP-controlled Ohio legislature opposed expanding Medicaid; Kasich infamously used a procedural trick to expand Medicaid anyway, over the legislature’s objections.
Kasich attacked the motives of Medicaid opponents, and literally said that Medicaid opponents would go to hell. Kasich later stated that he preferred Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion to its private insurance-based options: a position that is to the left of Hillary Clinton’s.
Kasich may be a conservative on other issues, but on the central questions of whether we should be expanding entitlements, and whether we should be increasing government control of the health care system, Kasich has more in common with Bernie Sanders than he does with Republicans.
Ted Cruz is conservatives’ last option to stop Trump
The simple fact is that in a three-man GOP race—Trump, Kasich, and Cruz—Ted Cruz is the only conservative. I’ve disagreed with Cruz in the past, particularly his wrongheaded (I could use stronger words) attempt to shut down the government over Obamacare in 2013.
Of the three remaining candidates, Cruz’s political profile is the most challenging in a general election. More generally, I’m deeply concerned that Cruz’s explicit strategy is to double down on conservatism’s existing constituencies, instead of finding ways to attracting younger and more diverse voters to the cause.
But if Ted Cruz is the GOP nominee, the worst-case scenario is that Hillary Clinton is President. If Donald Trump is the GOP nominee, the worst-case scenario is the disintegration of the Republican Party and the conservative movement—and Hillary Clinton as President.
Cruz would nominate constitutionalists to the Supreme Court—an especially important issue after the death of Antonin Scalia. Furthermore, a President Ted Cruz would push Congress to pass transformative legislation in a number of critical areas, like tax and entitlement reform.
It remains an electoral own goal that Republicans kicked their strongest general election candidate, Marco Rubio, to the curb. But the time to talk about that is later. The time to unite around Ted Cruz is now.
It’s time for all Rubio supporters—and all conservatives—to unite around @TedCruz.— Avik Roy (@Avik) March 16, 2016
Source : Forbes
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