Wow. Everyone expects politicians to shade the truth just a little bit but rarely to you encounter an comprehensive Nixonian utterance with traces of Bill Clinton tossed in for good measure:

Marco Rubio on Monday insisted the immigration reform bill he helped spearhead through the Senate was never intended to become law and that the authors of the bill expected conservatives in the House to make it “even better.”

“The Senate immigration law was not headed towards becoming law,” he told a questioner at a town hall in Rock Hill, S.C. “Ideally it was headed towards the House, where conservative members of the House were going to make it even better.”

Rubio added that the legislation he helped draft as part of a bipartisan team known as the “Gang of 8” was “the best we could do given the fact of who was running the Senate at the time,” noting Democrats were in control, “but it was never going to go from there to the president’s desk.”

This is the whole shameless statement

I don’t know how else to say this, so I’ll just say it: this is a baldfaced lie from start to finish. Virtually nothing in here is actually true. Rubio’s partners in drafting this bill were not only a) not conservative and b) not interested in helping House conservatives kill a bad bill but c) were long time supporters of a very liberal immigration and naturalization policy and d) the whole group, Rubio included, pushed very hard for the bill. The idea that the Senate had to pass something and that Rubio had to help pass it so it would die in the House is patently nonsense. Rubio was part of this group because he wanted to use his Tea Party credentials to convince other conservatives that the bill was not what it was: a bill that supported amnesty for and the rewarding of law breakers with citizenship.

It’s a notable departure from his comments on the bill when he was advocating for its passage in 2013, however. Then, Rubio said while he expected the House to make some changes to the final bill, he hoped they would ultimately “take a look” at it.

“I think we have a good piece of legislation they should take a look at. There are a lot of good ideas that they should adopt,” he said at the time, according to Reuters.

After it became clear later in 2013 that the House had no intention of taking up the legislation, Rubio began his walk away from a comprehensive approach.

Bingo.

In fact, Jeff Sessions was on Mark Levin’s show Monday and told a completely different story:

Sessions further stated that he doesn’t remember Rubio’s recollection that the House was going to improve the Gang of Eight bill, and that he voiced criticisms of the bill’s inability to pass the House. Sessions said that he didn’t think there would be much change of the bill in the House and that it was on the verge of passage in the House and was “very worried” that the bill would pass because it had “real momentum.” And the Gang of Eight had a campaign like a presidential campaign to pass the bill. He further added that the Gang of Eight resisted changes to the bill in the Senate.

This is the full segment of Levin’s show:

What makes this whole about face so unbelievable is that Rubio has been very open to legalizing illegal immigrants for about 20 years. There is no shame in his admitting he was wrong in the past and explaining how he came to change his mind. That is a sign of maturity. But telling a lie of this size is not the mark of a serious person. In fact, a lie of this type tells us that Rubio has such contempt for our intelligence that he actually can’t be bothered to come up with a good lie.