The open hand and the closed fist
By Max J. Castro Read Spanish Version
majcastro@google.com
Fulfilling
his pledge to change the political culture of
Hill and reached his hand out to Republican members of Congress. Their response
was swift and decisive: a clenched fist. It came in the form of a unanimous
Republican vote in the House of Representatives against the $819 billion
economic stimulus package supported by the president and Congressional
Democrats.
The
bill passed easily without a single GOP vote. But, like so many lemmings, one
hundred and seventy seven House Republicans lined up behind Minority Leader
John Boehner to say “no.”
At
a time when the economic crisis has shown the extent to which capitalism relies
on the state to keep it from crashing from the weight of its own
contradictions, the GOP seems hell-bent on showing its ideological purity even
at the cost of looking like out of touch obstructionist losers bucking a very
popular president. For a quarter century, the Republicans have had one answer
to every problem: lower taxes for the well-off. But reality — and the 2008
election — has shown that Americans no longer believe in that credo — if they
ever did. Now Americans are looking toward their government to get us out of
the mess the Republicans got us into with their upside down class war.
Meanwhile,
in the Senate, Republicans brandished their own clenched fist. In this case the
object was not the president of the
children and pregnant women. Incredibly,
Senate Republicans demonstrated that, in order to deny benefits to legal
immigrants, they were willing to try to scuttle a bill that will provide health
insurance for millions of American children.
Still
licking their wounds from the punishment they took in the election, the
Republicans seem determined to drive and even deeper wedge between themselves
and the Latino and immigrant electorates.
According
to the reporting of the Washington Post:
“The
Senate overwhelmingly approved legislation …to provide health insurance to 11
million low-income children, a bill that would for the first time spend federal
money to cover children and pregnant women who are legal immigrants….
“GOP lawmakers objected to the new provision
allowing states to enroll certain legal immigrants. Until now, many immigrants’
families had to wait five years for coverage.”
Republicans
cried foul at the insistence of Democrats to cover immigrant children and
pregnant women as part of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program
(SCHIP). Senator Charles E. Grassley declared himself “disgusted” at the way
the Democrats conducted the debate. “We could have had 95 votes,” exclaimed
Senator Orrin G. Hatch.
Yes,
Senators Grassley and Hatch, had Democrats been willing to throw immigrant
children and their mothers under a bus in the interest of a spurious
bipartisanship, you might have had a higher vote for passage of the bill. To
their credit, the Democrats declined that kind of a bargain. They were easily
able to pass the bill anyway. The naysayers were trounced 66-32, and in the
bargain they got to look like mean-spirited, xenophobic losers.
If
this is what Republicans mean by reaching out to the growing number of Latino
voters: Good luck in the next election! You are going to need it.
