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| Trust me — no way could Mr. Schumer put one over on me on immigration. |
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| Would I mislead you, Marco? |
One way to get a sense of the likely political effects of the Gang of Eight's immigration bill is to think of it as a contest of brainpower between Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL). In the long run, either the Democrat is going to have proved to have outsmarted the Republican or vice-versa. Which one would you bet on, Schumer or Rubio?
Commenter Zoink looks up the biographical evidence about the two main men of the immigration bill. From Wikipedia:
"Schumer attended public schools in Brooklyn, scoring 1600 on the SAT, and graduated as the valedictorian from James Madison High School in 1967.
"Schumer competed for Madison High on the It's Academic television quiz show.
"He attended Harvard College ... After completing his undergraduate degree, he continued to Harvard Law School, earning his Juris Doctor with honors in 1974."
Before recentering [SAT scores in 1995], only around 5-7 people a year got 1600 on the SAT each year. [In 1985-86, for example, nine students in the whole country got a 1600]. If Schumer isn't lying about this, he is certainly one of the 1000 or so smartest men in the USA.
Schumer has a career won-loss record in general elections of 15-0. Add in primaries, and he's 30-0 lifetime. He represents Wall Street's interests while also claiming to represent the middle class: that's not easy but his customers appear satisfied with his high-wire balancing act.
"Rubio attended South Miami Senior High School and graduated in 1989. He then attended Tarkio College for one year on a football scholarship from 1989 to 1990, before enrolling at Santa Fe Community College ... He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Florida in 1993, and his J.D. degree cum laude from the University of Miami School of Law in 1996."
Rubio did not graduate from Tarkio College because it was shut down by the federal government for acting as a "front" to scam the student loan system:
New York Times,A College Acts in Desperation And Dies Playing the Lender
April 17, 1991
"Auditors found that the college was so desperate to increase enrollment and stay alive that it had dealt out loans and grants to ineligible students until it owed the Federal Government more than $22 million.
'Acting as a Front'
"In a scheme more often connected with beauty academies than accredited institutions of higher education, Tarkio set up illegitimate off-campus programs and signed up thousands of unprepared students, many of them whisked right off city streets. Most of these students dropped out and never repaid their loans, leaving Tarkio at one point with the highest loan default rate in the nation.
"'Basically what you had was a small college acting as a front,' said Kent Kraus, Dean of Institutional Advancement at Tarkio."
In conclusion, Schumer attended the most competitive college in the USA and 2nd most competitive law school and plausibly claims to have a 99.999 percentile IQ, while Rubio attended what by one measure was the single worst 4-year colleges in the USA:
"In 1986 Tarkio's loan default rate was 79 percent, the highest in the nation for four-year colleges. The average default rate is about 6 percent."
