Top Hispanic Legal Group To Jeff Sessions: “We Expect Better”
This one’s pretty rough — yet another sign that the GOP’s attacks on Sonia Sotomayor are putting their standing with Latinos at serious risk.
In what is by far the most aggressive push-back from mainstream Hispanic organizations against Republicans over Obama’s SCOTUS nominee, a well-respected Latino legal group has written a scorching letter to Senator Jeff Sessions, the leader of the GOP’s efforts on Sotomayor, that suggests he’s guilty of fanning racism.
“We expect and are entitled to better from a sitting member of the United States Senate,” reads the letter, which is from Ramona Romero, the president of the National Hispanic Bar Association and has two dozen other groups as signatories.
The letter attacks Sessions for making an issue of Sotomayor’s work for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund. Sessions has suggested that it’s extremist, and Senator Mitch McConnell has also raised questions about the organization.
The National Hispanic Bar Association letter calls the group a “mainstream, well-respected organization,” and hits Sessions in ways that recall his checkered history on race relations:
“Attacks on Latino advocacy and civil rights organizations are not new -– we have seen figures in the media mis-characterize and slander our good works, using provocative terms that fan the flames of ethnic animosity. We expect and are entitled to better from a sitting member of the United States Senate.”
The letter supports the private view of some GOP strategists, which is that the attacks on Sotomayor risk destroying the GOP’s standing among Latinos at a time when the party is desperate to broaden its appeal. Senators like Jon Kyl and John Cornyn, who come from states with large Latino populations, can’t be happy about this kind of stuff.
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I suspect that Republican as well as Democrat Hispanics are in those groups and that’t not a good look for the GOP at all.
SG — would be very interesting to get top Latino GOPers on record. Good call.
Don’t be too hopeful Greg. Alex Castellanos, a GOP strategist will be happy to support Sessions, Have you listened to his “analyses” on CNN? He one of Wolf’s fabulous gabsters; you know, a member of the Best….
This kind of thing is par for the course with Sessions:
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/07/07/sesssions-crusade-sotomayor/
I mean what do really expect from the GOP, especially these days? They are concerned that there turf battles over the last 2 decades in which stoking the emotions from their base regarding issues such as abortion, immigration, environment and sexual orientation have left many who saw themselves as conservatives or not-dem’s wondering what there party stands for.
One thing the GOP has done well over the last 8 years or so is play the victim and throw bombs at their opponents. Oh and they also lie quite often, or should I say mis-speak, like Rep Boehner did the other day regarding stimulus funds in Ohio. Not to say that the Dem’s don’t have their own deceptive practices.
Republican Jeff Sessions famously said he thought that he thought the white supremacists in the Ku Klux Klan where fine people until he learned some of them smoked marijuana.
Republican Sessions was also the Republican leader that regularly called a black employee “boy”.
The GOP needs to reflect on what will make up their supporters in the future. They will find a diverse population that they currently do not represent or acknowledge. Latinos and African-Americans will be running for office more aggressively than ever before. Many will end up replacing those who have become “dinosaurs” in their thought leadership and it is time for them to go.
That’s about what you can expect from Jefferson Beauregard Sessions.
Oh no, it’s much longer than 8 years that they’ve been good at that! Have you ever watched or read Vice Presidential candidate Richard Nixon’s 1952 “Checkers speech”? It’s a triumph of victimhood! There’s a whole subset of Republican political strategy and strategists who cut their teeth on President Nixon’s tactical style of professional victimhood. Karl Rove is one of the most prominent of them. Then there’s Newt Gingrich, one of the nation’s least liked politicians who first made a name for himself by making incindiary speeches on the House floor at the end of the day, when the House was essentially deserted. He wasn’t making those speeches to his colleagues. He was making them for the cable television camera that recorded the House’s proceedings. That was no accident. It was deliberate. No, all in all, it hasn’t been simply 8 years of victim mongering and bomb throwing, it’s been 50 years of victim mongering and 20 of bomb throwing.
And there will be Muslims, and Buddhists, and Hindus, all of whom will have dark hair, dark eyes, and skin in various shades of brown.
Nice to see you a post on this topic, I need to book mark this site. Keep up the good work.