Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho) grew frustrated at CPAC on Thursday about calls for the GOP to improve its tone on immigration, insisting that there are only "five Republicans" -- he didn't name names -- that hurt the entire party's reputation.
"I know tone is important but we need to stop flagellating ourselves," he said. "You have five Republicans that have that rhetoric."
Labrador was one of five panelists at CPAC's immigration panel, which took a noticeably more pro-immigration reform stance than the anti-"amnesty" railing heard at past conferences. The panelists used the term "undocumented immigrants," eschewing "illegals" or "aliens," language some consider to be offensive.
There wasn't much dissension on stage, but the audience wasn't entirely supportive. As pollster Whit Ayres called for the GOP to bring in Hispanics, one man yelled out, "legally!" Later, an audience member yelled "politically correct!" at the stage.
But despite the centrist message, President Barack Obama received plenty of criticism. Labrador and other panelists said that in the 2007 immigration reform effort, Democrats, including then-Sen. Obama, bent to the will of "Big Labor" groups that opposed guest-worker provisions. The same thing could happen this time, they said.
"If this does fall apart it will be because of the president," said Jennifer Korn, director of the conservative Hispanic Leadership Network.
"The Democratic Party has a problem right now," Labrador said. "They have to pick between their two favorite children ... [Hispanics] and the labor groups."
Of course, labor groups were not the only opponents of the 2007 bill. Thousands upon thousands of conservatives called GOP lawmakers' offices urging them to vote against reform, but nobody mentioned them Thursday as reasons for the bill's failure.
Center for Immigration Studies Director Mark Krikorian, a vocal opponent of immigration reform, tweeted angrily from the back of the room. He will appear on a panel on Friday, but neither his group nor others like it was given a seat at this one.
"So now the conservative base that stopped amnesty is demonized at #cpac2013," Krikorian tweeted after a discussion of the failure of reform in 2007. "Contradictorily, Labrador blames big labor for killing amnesty," he wrote next.
Below, a liveblog of the latest updates from CPAC:
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