“How do we put together a bill and then the guy who put it together says that he may not vote for it?” Graham asked me. “I just don’t get what we’re doing here.”

His specific complaint: that GOP Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, a fellow member of the Senate “gang of eight” who had spent months drafting a bipartisan immigration reform bill, seemed to be backing away from the legislation…

Graham needed Rubio to bless the deal and stick with it, not flinch at the first whiff of tea party gunpowder.