Wednesday, June 17, 2015

RNC Fails to Denounce Donald Trump's Anti-Immigrant Sceed





As noted in a post yesterday, Donald Trump's announcement that he is running for the GOP presidential nomination (an indulging his own narcissism in the process) is going to spotlight some of the worse aspects of today's GOP.  Already, the RNC is avoiding any condemnation of Trump's racist anti-immigrant screed during his announcement.  One can only hope that Hispanic and other minority voters are noting the RNC's silence which speaks volumes.  Sadly, Trump's statements reflect the thinking of much of the GOP party base.  It's beyond ugly and utterly contrary to the embrace of the Gospel message that the GOP pretends to revere.  Think Progress looks at the RNC's failure to condemn Trump.  Here are excepts:

Hours after Donald Trump launched into an anti-immigrant tirade during his presidential campaign announcement and claimed that Mexican immigrants are rapists and drug dealers, a top Republican party official has done nothing to denounce those comments. 

Sean Spicer, the Republican National Committee’s Chief Strategist & Communications Director, told CNN that Trump’s comments were “not helpful to the cause” of making the Republican party inclusive to Latino voters. But almost immediately, Spicer pivoted to the topic of improving border security. 

The Republican party has not seen much success in its repeated attempts to court Latino voters. Soon after Mitt Romney lost the 2012 general election, the RNC released a widely-circulated “autopsy report” that sought to widen its appeal to audiences like Latino voters on issues, including immigration reform. But Republicans have killed any chances of comprehensive immigration reform efforts like the 2013 bipartisan Senate bill. So far in this Congress, the Republican majorities have only introduced legislation seeking to end the president’s executive action to shield some undocumented immigrants from deportation, a temporary stopgap created in the absence of Congressional action.

For many Latino voters however, immigration reform is a deeply personal matter that extends to their families. A Center for American Progress report found that Mexicans are disproportionately affected by immigration enforcement policies. Mexican immigrants comprise 58 percent of the unauthorized population in the United States and at least seven million children in the United States live with parents from Mexico with half of these children “estimated to be U.S. citizens living with noncitizen parents,” the report noted.

With about 800,000 eligible Latino voters turning 18 every year, there will be 28 million Latino voters in 2016. They made up ten percent of the electorate in 2012, mostly casting ballots for President Obama. But with a Republican party defiantly opposed to immigration actions that are widely popular among 89 percent of Latinos surveyed by a Latino Decisions November 2014 poll, it remains to be seen whether the party will be able to achieve the goal of inclusivity

The sad reality is that the GOP has no real desire to be inclusive.  It continues to prostitute itself to racists and white supremacists and only gives lip service to being inclusive.  The real goal is to dupe Hispanics to vote Republican even as the party continues to hate and vilify them.  One can only hope that the effort fails miserably.

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