Graham says immigration bill must pass for repugican cabal to survive, weeks after threatening to kill it

The repugican cabal’s biggest drama queen, repugican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, is changing his tune yet again on immigration reform.

Only a few weeks ago, Graham breathlessly claimed that any effort to include gay bi-national couples in the immigration bill would cause him to withdraw his support for the legislation, effectively killing it.  So Democrats threw gays under the bus, yet again refusing to include our number one immigration priority in the so-called “comprehensive” immigration reform bill in order to appease repugicans.
Some of us at the time had been arguing that the repugicans were bluffing; that the repugican cabal is desperate to get immigration reform passed in order to weaken the lock the Democratic party has on the Latino vote (a population on the rise in terms of its percentage of the electorate).  There is no way the repugican cabal is going to risk killing immigration reform for anything.  At least not the Senate repugicans.
And then yesterday, what happened?  Lindsey Graham pivoted on his stilettos and said I was right.  Graham is now claiming that the immigration bill simply must pass, because if it doesn’t pass, repugicans will lose the presidential election in 2016 and beyond.

“If we don’t pass immigration reform, if we don’t get it off the table in a reasonable, practical way, it doesn’t matter who we run in 2016,” [Graham] said. “We’re in a demographic death spiral as a cabal.
The only way we can get back in the good graces of the Hispanic community, in my view is pass comprehensive immigration reform.”

A demographic death spiral.  Sounds serious.  Sounds like the imminent demise of the repugican cabal.
So color me confused.  Is the immigration bill so insignificant that Lindsey Graham is going to kill the legislation in order to, among other reasons postulated, convince the tea party that he’s not gay?
Or does Lindsey Graham think that the immigration bill is a dagger pointed at the heart of the repugican cabal, and thus the bill simply must pass for the repugican cabal to survive?
And if the bill must pass for the Grepugican cabal to survive, does that mean that Lindsey Graham was willing to kill his own party in order to bash the gays as some kind of election-year beard?  Doubtful.
At least now we know the truth: Lindsey Graham has been living a lie.  And sadly, Democrats fell for it.
But the good news is that at least now we know we can put gay couples back in the immigration bill, since Lindsey Graham just admitted that without this immigration bill, the repugican cabal effectively dies a horrible death. Which would not be a bad thing.