Catastrophe - Dick Morris [54]
And once they come here illegally and then, through amnesty, get legal status, Obama will speed their path to citizenship and the ballot box. As he told a Spanish-speaking radio audience, “We’re going to start by really trying to work on how to improve the current system so that people who want to be naturalized, who want to become citizens…that they are able to do it; that it’s cheaper, that it’s faster, that they have an easier time in terms of sponsoring family members.”185
Why? Because Obama wants their votes. He needs them to keep his socialist agenda from being repealed.
ACTION AGENDA
Republicans must not surrender the Latino vote to Obama.
The president will probably succeed in persuading his top-heavy Democratic majorities in Congress to pass his amnesty proposals for illegal immigrants. But that doesn’t have to mean the end of the Republican Party. Those newly enfranchised Latinos can become loyal Republicans!
Hispanic Americans, particularly Mexican Americans, are often very conservative. One-third now vote Republican. Of the 45 million Latinos in the United States, 15 million are evangelical Protestants who favor the Republican values agenda. They are pro-life and voted overwhelmingly for Bush in 2004.
As the Latinos move up the social and economic ladder, they will inevitably vote more Republican. Only if the GOP convinces them that there’s no room for them in the party will they stay outside.
That would never happen, you’re thinking. Not so fast: once upon a time, that’s exactly what the Republican Party did to black voters. Before the 1930s, those blacks who could vote overwhelmingly backed the Republicans—the party of Lincoln, the Great Emancipator. To these African American voters, the Democrats were the party of former slaveholders in the racist South. In the 1930s and 1940s, however, Franklin Roosevelt and, particularly, Harry Truman made important inroads into the black vote. Truman based his comeback victory in 1948 in large part on pushing antilynching laws and integrating the armed forces. But Eisenhower, a Republican, carried the black vote in 1952 and 1956.
It was only when John F. Kennedy telephoned the wife of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as the civil rights leader languished in a Georgia prison cell, that blacks began to consider his candidacy. Even so, Kennedy edged Nixon out among black voters by only a small margin in 1960.
Then the GOP blew it. Even though a larger percentage of congressional Republicans backed civil rights legislation than did Democrats, in 1964 the party’s presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, voted against the landmark Civil Rights Act, which ended racial discrimination. His vote, and President Johnson’s success in passing the legislation, assured the Democrats of 90 percent of the black vote in 1964. And they have gotten it ever since.
If the Republican Party wishes to avoid extinction—given the swelling numbers of Hispanic voters—it has to be more Latino-friendly, dropping attempts to force English-only initiatives and to curb schooling for illegal immigrants’ children. In 2008, the Republican Party convinced Latinos that it didn’t have their interests at heart. The party must avoid repeating that terrible mistake, lest it become irreversible.
COOKING THE CENSUS
When the U.S. Constitution was written, slaveholders in the southern states worried that the increasing population growth in the North would leave them politically impotent, unable to protect their right to enslave other human beings. So they adopted a provision that each slave—who had no rights and was considered property—would still be counted in the census as five-eighths of a person.
This outrageous provision, which the South made a precondition for approving the Constitution, gave the slaveholders extra votes in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College and helped keep proslavery presidents in office until 1860.
Now President Obama is hoping to use the census to give cities, liberals, and minorities extra representation—just like the slaveholders