Marco Rubio, Los Lucha-Dorkus

GOP Sen. Marco Rubio has ripped off his mask and -- surprise! --  he's against his own immigration plan now!

The most prominent conservative supporter of sweeping immigration reform is calling on Congress to dial back the effort and instead focus on making incremental changes, delivering a significant blow to the prospects of reform.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) now opposes a bicameral conference committee to reach a final resolution to the Senate-passed bill, his spokesman said, which anxious pro-reform advocates believe is the only feasible way to salvage the comprehensive overhaul.

"The point is that at this time, the only approach that has a realistic chance of success is to focus on those aspects of reform on which there is consensus through a series of individual bills," Alex Conant, a top spokesman for Rubio, told TPM in an email. "Otherwise, this latest effort to make progress on immigration will meet the same fate as previous efforts: failure."

Rubio is desperately trying to throw everybody under the bus that he can find, so that he can say "Well, I fought the good fight in the ring for immigration reform, but we're going to have to take what we can get, or get nothing at all."

"[E]arlier this year, Senator Rubio put aside his personal preference for a piecemeal approach and reached across the aisle to craft a bipartisan solution in the Senate. And unlike many of the proponents of reform in the Democratic party, he did so despite strong opposition within his own party and at a significant and well documented political price," Conant said. "But sufficient support for that approach simply does not exist at this time. And in fact it has only eroded further as evidenced by the fact that virtually every House Republican working on a bipartisan comprehensive bill has since abandoned that effort."

The ambitious Florida senator saw his standing diminish among conservative voters after he supported the Senate bill. Opposing conference on the Senate bill leaves little, if any, room to pass reform through a divided Congress as the broad coalitions that hold together the Senate legislation would splinter if any major components are excluded. House Republicans have resisted President Barack Obama's repeated calls for reviving the stalled effort, and lack an internal consensus on how to proceed on an incremental basis.

So Rubio's plan is to blame everyone in Washington who isn't named Marco Rubio when immigration reform crashes and burns yet again.  He's playing the part of the weary warrior who has to regroup in order to fight the good fight another day, only what he's really doing is selling out Latino voters just in time to make a 2016 run.

Funny how that works.