{"id":1319,"date":"2010-04-29T02:13:26","date_gmt":"2010-04-29T09:13:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=1319"},"modified":"2010-04-29T02:13:26","modified_gmt":"2010-04-29T09:13:26","slug":"the-reason-for-gop-racism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2010\/04\/29\/the-reason-for-gop-racism\/","title":{"rendered":"The Reason for GOP Racism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Despite all the negative press Arizona has received for the GOP \u201cShow me your papers\u201d law, and despite the financial cost to the state from the swelling Boycott Arizona movement, other states seem poised to jump on the bigotry bandwagon.<\/font><\/p>\n

I found this table at Think Progress<\/a>:<\/font><\/p>\n

\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
\n

STATE<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

BILL<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

STATUS<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

\n

Utah<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

Require immigrants to carry proof of status, require law enforcement officers to question anyone they believe is in the country illegally, and target employers who hire or transport undocumented immigrants.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

Legislation still has to be drafted, but Rep. Stephen Sandstorm (R) claims he \u201chas the support to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

\n

Georgia<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

Nathan Deal (R), who is running for Governor, wants to propose legislation that mirrors Arizona\u2019s.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

Tentatively pending Deal\u2019s election.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

\n

Colorado<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

Today, Colorado gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis (R) said that if he were governor, he would seek to pass something \u201cvery similar\u201d to what Arizona enacted.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

Tentatively pending McInnis\u2019 election.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

\n

Maryland<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

State Delegate Pat McDonough (R) \u201cplans to start sending a survey to every candidate for the General Assembly \u2014 along with the candidates for governor \u2014 asking them whether they agree with Arizona\u2019s approach.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

McDounough\u2019s survey will start being circulated this week as he hopes to \u201cknow who is in favor of the Arizona bill and who is not\u201d by this summer. <\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

\n

Ohio<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

Butler County Sheriff Rick Jones and Ohio Rep. Courtney Combs (R) sent a letter to Gov. Ted Strickland asking him \u201cto employ\u201d his \u201cleadership role\u201d \u201cto assure legislation is passed that will mirror\u201d Arizona\u2019s.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

Strickland\u2019s press person says he \u201chasn\u2019t had an opportunity to review Arizona law\u201d and is concerned it might be unconstitutional.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

\n

North Carolina<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

Local anti-immigrant groups claim that lawmakers have told them that \u201cthe chances similar legislation will be filed here is over 95%.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

The same groups also concede that such legislation wouldn\u2019t \u201cget far\u201d in their state.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

\n

Texas<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

Republican state Rep. Debbie Riddle of Tomball says she plans to push for a law similar to Arizona\u2019s.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

Riddle says she will introduce the measure in the January legislative session.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

\n

Texas<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

Farmers Branch, a Dallas suburb of 30,000 people, passed an ordinance written by IRLI lawyer Kris Kobach which would prevent landlords from renting houses or apartments to undocumented immigrants.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

Last month, a U.S. District judge ruled the ordinance unconstitutional. IRLI is helping Farmers Branch repeal the District judge decision.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

\n

Missouri<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

The state legislature is considering a law, likely written by Kobach, that would make it unlawful for any person to conceal, harbor, transport, or shelter \u201cillegal aliens\u201d and would also make it a crime for undocumented immigrants to transport themselves.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

The bill has been referred to the Missouri House International Trade and Immigration Committee.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

\n

Oklahoma<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

Restrict the ability of undocumented immigrants to obtain IDs or public assistance, give police authority to check the status of anyone arrested, and make it a felony to knowingly provide shelter, transportation or employment to the undocumented.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

After IRLI filed an amicus brief in the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in support of HB 1804, the court refused to reconsider its decision that prohibits Oklahoma from enforcing two of the main parts of HB 1804.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

\n

Nebraska<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

Residents in Fremont Nebraska likely will vote in July on a proposed ordinance to ban the \u201charboring,\u201d hiring and renting to undocumented immigrants.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

Last Friday, the Nebraska Supreme Court upheld a lower court\u2019s ruling that there was no authority to stop an election on the ordinance following a petition filed by Kobach.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Is that spooky, or what?<\/font><\/p>\n

One thing has been troubling me.  Is the GOP that racist?  I think so.  But the GOP usually goes to extreme ends to hide their from view.  Otherwise, a complete incompetent like Michael Steel could never have become head of the RNC, and certainly could never have survived his many \u2018heckuva job, Brownie<\/em>\u2019 moments. Yet the bigotry in this law is so obvious that I wondered at what they are up to.  Then I read this, and it fell into place.<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\"Arizona-law\"<\/a> Don’t be fooled. The way the media plays the story, it was a wave of racist, anti-immigrant hysteria that moved Arizona Republicans to pass a sick little law, signed last week, requiring every person in the state to carry papers proving they are US citizens.<\/p>\n

I don’t buy it. Anti-Hispanic hysteria has always been as much a part of Arizona as the saguaro cactus and excessive air-conditioning.<\/p>\n

What’s new here is not the politicians’ fear of a xenophobic "Teabag" uprising.<\/p>\n

What moved GOP Governor Jan Brewer to sign the Soviet-style show-me-your-papers law is the exploding number of legal Hispanics, US citizens all, who are daring to vote – and daring to vote Democratic by more than two-to-one<\/strong>. Unless this demographic locomotive is halted, Arizona Republicans know their party will soon be electoral toast. Or, if you like, tortillas.<\/p>\n

In 2008, working for "Rolling Stone" with civil rights attorney Bobby Kennedy, our team flew to Arizona to investigate what smelled like an electoral pogrom against Chicano voters . . . directed by one Jan Brewer.<\/p>\n

Brewer, then secretary of state, had organized a racially loaded purge of the voter rolls that would have made Katherine Harris blush. Beginning after the 2004 election, under Brewer’s command, no fewer than 100,000 voters, overwhelmingly Hispanic, were blocked from registering to vote. In 2005, the first year of the Great Brown-Out, one in three Phoenix residents found their registration applications rejected<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

That statistic caught my attention. Voting or registering to vote if you’re not a citizen is a felony, a big-time jail-time crime. And arresting such criminal voters is easy: After all, they give their names and addresses.<\/p>\n

So I asked Brewer’s office, had she busted a single one of these thousands of allegedly illegal voters? Did she turn over even one name to the feds for prosecution?<\/p>\n

No, not one.<\/p>\n

\"GOPgo\"<\/a> Which raises the question: Were these disenfranchised voters the criminal, non-citizens that Brewer tagged them to be, or just not-quite-white voters given the Jose Crow treatment, entrapped in document-chase trickery?<\/p>\n

The answer was provided by a federal prosecutor who was sent on a crazy hunt all over the Western mesas looking for these illegal voters. "We took over 100 complaints, we investigated for almost two years, I didn’t find one prosecutable voter fraud case<\/strong>."<\/p>\n

This prosecutor, David Iglesias, is a prosecutor no more<\/strong>. When he refused to fabricate charges of illegal voting among immigrants, his firing was personally ordered by the president of the United States, George W. Bush, under orders from his boss, Karl Rove.<\/p>\n

Iglesias’ jurisdiction was next door, in New Mexico, but he told me that Rove and the Republican chieftains were working nationwide to whip up anti-immigrant hysteria with public busts of illegal voters, even though there were none<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

"They wanted some splashy pre-election indictments," Iglesias told me. The former prosecutor, himself a Republican, paid the price when he stood up to this vicious attack on citizenship.<\/p>\n

But Secretary of State Brewer followed the Rove plan to a T. The weapon she used to slice the Arizona voter rolls was a 2004 law, known as "Prop 200," which required proof of citizenship to register. It is important to see the Republicans’ latest legislative horror show, sanctioning cops to stop residents and prove citizenship, as just one more step in the party’s desperate plan to impede Mexican-Americans from marching to the ballot box<\/strong>… [emphasis added<\/em>]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Inserted from <Alternet<\/a>><\/font><\/p>\n

With the GOP, the lowest common denominator is always power.  They have a long history of keeping poor and minority voters from exercising their voting rights.  The bill will serve to marginalize millions of Hispanic voters.  Marginalized people tend to disenfranchise themselves.  Feeling that they have no part in this nation, they tend not to vote.  There is nothing that the GOP will not do to take away the voting rights of opposition voters.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Despite all the negative press Arizona has received for the GOP \u201cShow me your papers\u201d law, and despite the financial cost to the state from the swelling Boycott Arizona movement, other states seem poised to jump on the bigotry bandwagon. I found this table at Think Progress: STATE BILL STATUS Utah Require immigrants to carry […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1319"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1319\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}