Vox Sentences: Why everyone is suddenly slamming Ted Cruz over immigration

Ted Cruz discovers momentum means everyone wants to take you down; you wanted to see Martin Shkreli arrested, and the FBI knew it; and, oh yeah, a $1.1T government funding bill.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

A flip-flop that actually matters

Getty / Ethan Miller

• Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz are generally considered two of the more "serious" contenders for the GOP nomination ("serious" means "not Trump"). And this week, they finally duked it out over the issue that supposedly divides them: immigration.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• Or rather, they're duking it out over whether they disagree on immigration. Rubio says they don't — based on a single amendment to the Senate's 2013 immigration bill that would have allowed unauthorized immigrants to get legal without becoming citizens, which kind of mirrors Rubio's position today.

  [MSNBC / Benjy Sarlin]

• Now, Cruz says that the amendment was a deliberate troll and that he never has and never will support legal status for unauthorized immigrants.

  [The Hill / Elliot Smilowitz]

• Cruz is getting a lot of flak for this — not just from supporters of the 2013 Senate bill, but from establishment conservative outlets like National Review.

  [National Review Online / Jim Geraghty]

• Here's why this particular flip-flop (if it is one) is such a big deal: it sticks Ted Cruz smack-dab between the voters he wants to court and the elites who still could try to block his nomination.

• Cruz's best shot for the nomination is to scoop up Donald Trump voters, which he can't do if his immigration record is seen as Rubio-esque.

  [Vox / Ezra Klein]

• Meanwhile, GOP elites who support immigration reform have a history of reconciling themselves to a nominee because they believe he's secretly in favor of legalizing unauthorized immigrants.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

Why you should think twice about cheering the arrest of Martin Shkreli

Getty / Andrew Burton

• Martin Shkreli has become the Internet's favorite villain. First, he jacked up the price of the anti-parasite drug Daraprim — a decades-old generic — from $13.50 to $750 a pill.

  [New York Times / Andrew Pollack]

• Then, he bought up the only copy Wu-Tang Clan will ever produce of their album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.

  [Vox / Caroline Framke]

• So when he was arrested today for securities fraud, people were gleeful — even though the arrest has literally nothing to do with the things people ostensibly hate him for.

  [Vox / Alvin Chang]

• Shkreli's essentially accused of running a Ponzi scheme. But if the allegations are true, he was unusually great at it.

  [Bloomberg View / Matt Levine]

• It looks like the FBI knew that the Internet would approve of the bust — Reuters got a suspiciously clear photograph of the arrest, which seems unlikely if the photographer hadn't been tipped off.

  [Popehat / Ken White]

• We don't know if Shkreli's guilty of the allegations. Furthermore, if he is, we don't know that the FBI didn't start investigating him because of his newfound fame and charged him with what they could find — just like they did with Dennis Hastert earlier this year.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• Maybe the FBI just did it so that it could seize the Wu-Tang album and release it to the American public. Stranger things have happened. Probably.

  [Vice / Sarah Jeong]

So Congress is about to fund the government for nine months at a time

AFP / Saul Loeb

• Congress is set to pass a $1.1 trillion bill to fund most of the federal government through September — with minimal drama.

  [USA Today / Paul Singer]

• The deal is the result of Democrats and Republicans actually negotiating over the bill for several weeks, rather than waiting until the verge of government shutdown and panicking.

• The omnibus package is actually a pretty big deal, as Ezra Klein explains — not least because it reveals the things the parties really are willing to compromise on, and what they aren't.

  [Vox / Ezra Klein]

• One thing that's apparently very important to Republicans is keeping the SEC from requiring corporations to disclose their political spending.

  [Huffington Post / Zach Carter]

• Part of the deal, but not actually part of the bill, is that Congress will also pass a "tax extenders" package — which is a misnomer because the bill actually extends a bunch of tax breaks.

  [Vox / Michelle Hackman]

• Also (reportedly) part of the deal: a promise from Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid that Democrats won't try to filibuster appropriations bills in 2016.

  [Politico / Jake Sherman, Anna French and Laura Palmer]

MISCELLANEOUS

Commercial flights will resume between the US and Cuba [Reuters / Arshad Mohammed and Jeffrey Dastin]

• Inside a very long and questionably effective DEA investigation.

  [ProPublica / David Epstein]

• This is what happens when you arm prison guards with guns.

  [Huffington Post / Dana Liebelson]

• A persuasive argument that the only antidote to Trumpism is a more diverse Republican Party.

  [BuzzFeed News / Adam Serwer]

• A real-time emoji tracker for the 2016 presidential campaign.

  [The Atlantic / Andrew McGill]

VERBATIM

"He is a very outstanding man, unquestionably talented." [Vladimir Putin on Donald Trump via AFP]

• "In Breaking Bad and The Sopranos, Walter White and Tony Soprano, respectively, rose above good and evil like Nietzsche's Übermensch. Jessica Jones, on the other hand, is antiheroic because she hates and blames herself."

  [Pacific Standard / Aaron Bady]

• "The commission has found no evidence, for example, of any law stating that in the city of Liverpool, it is illegal for a woman to be topless in public except while working as a clerk in a tropical fish store."

  [NYT / Stephen Castle]

• "One word of warning: Waffle makers release a scalding amount of steam, so be sure to wear your enormous Stormtrooper oven mitts to protect your hands."

  [A. V. Club / Dennis Lee]

• "It is helpful to think of Justin Bieber here, at this point in his life, as a biblical character at the very bottom of a Jobian well of his own making."

  [GQ / Taffy Brodesser-Akner]

WATCH THIS

The Syrian civil war, explained in French [YouTube / Vox]

Vox / Johnny Harris, Christophe Haubursin, and Max Fisher

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