the second big one is on nsa surveillance. cruz led the fight to reform the nsa s program. rubio opposed that bill. obviously, the biggest one is on immigration. where rubio i think to his credit worked very hard to pass comprehensive immigration reform bill and in a republican pry merck he s really paying the price for that support. cruz of course opposed to this bill. you write about this and you say this is why, in the long run, cruz has the advantage in his three policy fights with rubio. my view of these fights in the republican primary is who has the position that is closest to president obama, right. and that s a bad place to be. so on two of these three issues we just outlined, nsa surveillance, interventionism and immigration, cruz is more aligned excuse me, marco rubio is more aligned with the
deserves credit for stepping forward. there is no one else. if he had not done this, it would have been weeks and weeks and weeks, because frankly there just isn t a republican out there other than paul ryan, not kevin mccarthy, not steve scalise, the whip, certainly not john boehner who is resigning, who could get 218 republicans to say yes, i want him to be speaker. that said, this vote in some ways is the easiest vote for paul ryan to get a majority of the majority on. there s not all that much to it. most people, you saw this 40-plus people voted for dan webster in the internal republican vote last evening. most people can say, look, i voiced my opposition but in the end the choice between paul ryan and nancy pelosi, i m for paul ryan. what about in the future other conflicts on immigration, on energy, things that come up, those policy fights are going to be a lot harder for him. you re right, though, john boehner played the bad cop here to paul ryan s good cop master
right now. a lot of people in the press here hear a focus grouped poll tested phrase which a lot of stay away from middle class, because people in it feel insecure so let s talk about something else, figure out some way to avoid that phrase. and again, her toughest critics hear that and say there they are again, the calculated poll tested cynical clintons trying to not just speak with normal people. and i think that s a real challenge. she ll have to do something that is not poll tested not market driven, not focus group driven and that may require her to actually say some things that upset some friends on wall street. it s whether or not she will come out to fight for dodd-frank to actually go farther than where dodd-frank went in terms of breaking up the banks, in terms of equalizing the rates that banks pay and students pay. there are a lot of policy fights on which she can show that she s standing up with every day
that is really not true at all. by most estimates it would create several thousand temporary construction jobs and only 35 permanent jobs. compare that to the number of jobs created in the economy last month 300,000. so the session hasn t even started yet. lawmakers are already digging in for policy fights. but the republican senator says there s no government shut down on the horizon and when they want to use the president they will use the power of the purse. with the new congress could come a new speaker of the house. nine republicans now saying they support someone other sdwloon boehner. he will be making around for a speaker. we have heard a lot of
sort of noise makers to create any kind of operation because mccarthy had it built in. as the whip he knows everybody s phone number and birthday and first name of their spouse and had the votes in hand. he was able to launch quickly, which was helpful here. the noise making will continue. that s part of the process. we get to enjoy covering it but it s not going to change anything. kevin mccarthy friendly to reporters, loves sort of being in action but this guy is not a policy not at all. politics are politics. neither is boehner. how much we got the number one and number two guys not really big policy guys and the whole conservative movement is based on supposedly wanting more policy fights. remember, in theory cantor was supposed to be the guy he was more the meat. right. who was kind of the moving the water in a different way to different audiences, to different segments of the population. i mean, mccarthy, he knows roughly about as much about policy as i do, whic