Former G.W. Bush Staffer: Latinos Must Vote Trump Out

Decent,moral Republicans for the most part have left the Republican party in the age of Trump.  Those who remain are (i) delusional and pretending the GOP is the party it once was several generations ago, or (ii) totally subscribe to the racism, misogyny and xenophobia Trump uses as his stock in trade. Either way, there truly is no excuse for remaining in the GOP, a party I once served more than a generation ago.  The Trump/GOP tax cuts for the wealthy - which created a huge surge in the federal deficit - destroyed any fig leaf for the pretense that one votes Republican "supports fiscal responsibility."  Likewise, the Trump/Christofascist effort to inflict right wing religious beliefs on all shows the falsity of the pretense that the GOP stands for smaller government.  Now, in an op-ed in the Washington Post, an apparent former Republican who served as associate director of public liaison in the George W. Bush White House from 2001-2004 is urging Hispanic Americans to register to vote and go to the polls in 2020 to voted Donald Trump out of office.  Here are excerpts:

Sept. 15 was the start of Hispanic Heritage Month — a time that celebrates a community built on faith, family and a strong work ethic. We are teachers, doctors, lawyers, judges, members of the military, police officers and even astronauts. All contribute greatly to the United States.

The feeling is not reciprocated by today’s Republican Party. It is no place for Latinos. We don’t feel welcome in a party that condones racism and looks away while the president degrades our community and destroys America. The once-proud party of Lincoln, established to abolish slavery, has been transformed into a comatose crew brainwashed by white identity politics and narrow-minded nationalist nostalgia.

I know a little about this. I am a Republican. I worked in the George W. Bush White House. And I say to my fellow Latinos: I’m not asking you to become a Democrat. But I am asking you to vote President Trump out of office.

Some of us have already left the GOP, of course, disgusted by Trump and his accomplices. Others among us remain alienated and aloof, waiting out the Trump tornado.

But the wait-him-out approach is no longer viable. Republicans have lost control of the monster they helped create. Trump hasn’t changed. From day one, Trump spewed his white-supremacist views, promising to halt the invasion of immigrants and spurring a rhetoric of resentment and retaliation against the “other.” No matter our background, we have been vilified as invaders, marked as illegal and degraded as subhuman. The silence from prominent Republicans is deafening. They have allowed Trump to normalize bigotry and use it as a winning strategy for their benefit. They enabled him to turn racist rhetoric into racial conflict, dividing our nation.

Worse than saying nothing or tolerating his tantrums, some even protect Trump, colluding with the devil for fear of political demise.

And now, they have blood on their hands. The Walmart shooting in El Paso on Aug. 3 was the inevitable outcome of 30 straight months of hate speech coming from the White House. Fueled by the president’s vitriol, a killer sought out immigrants to slaughter. The shooting isn’t just a tragedy; it’s a massacre, a direct hit against our community.

Republicans will pay a price for this situation and for their silence. By the 2020 election, Hispanics will be the largest racial or ethnic minority group in the electorate — 32 million will be eligible to vote. At the same time, 1 in 10 eligible voters will be Generation Z, those between the ages 18 and 23, who are socially liberal and more racially and ethnically diverse. A vote against Trump is a stand for human freedom and a future where America is again known for its ideals and not ignorance.

Republicans need to dust off their moral compass and remember what they stand for — and what they stand against. If they do not, they will lose Latinos forever and relegate themselves once more to minority status, likely unable to regain control of Congress or the White House again. If countering racism is not motivation enough for the GOP to act, perhaps its looming political demise will be.

The United States is a great country. Hispanic Heritage Month honors the contributions the community has made — and will keep making — to keep it that way. And without Trump, the United States will be even better.

I urge all decent and moral Americans eligible to vote to register and cast votes against Trump and the GOP in 2020.  We are no longer talking about political differences.  The choice is between morality and decency and immorality and hate.    If you live in Virginia, strike a blow for decency and morality this November: vote a straight Democrat ticket and send the GOP a strong message.

Justice Roberts Follows Constitution And the Right Convulses

The relevant portion of the U.S. Constitution (Article 1, Section 2) that mandates census every ten (10) years reads in relevant part as follows:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

Note, there is NO reference to citizenship.  Only a reference to "free persons" and then to "all other persons."  Yet, when Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the Supreme Court opinion rejecting the Trump/Pence regime's disingenuous effort to add a citizenship question on the 2020 national census, you would have thought he committed some combination of blasphemy and treason to listen to some on the political right.  A piece in Politico looks at this reaction by this group which the media continues to false label as "conservatives."  Here are excerpts:

Chief Justice John Roberts just keeps on breaking conservatives’ hearts. On two consecutive days this week, Roberts sided with the court’s liberal wing to deliver 5-4 rulings that deeply disappointed right-leaning lawyers and pundits who had been counting on near-certain victory from a court now stocked with a pair of Trump-appointed justices handpicked by conservative legal activists.

On Thursday, Roberts stunned many court watchers by invalidating a Trump administration decision to add a question on citizenship to the 2020 census.

Adding to the sting is the fact that the chief justice wasn’t just along for the ride on the closely watched ruling: He penned the majority opinion, which essentially accused Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross of lying about his reasons for seeking to add the question on citizenship.

A day earlier, Roberts was the sole GOP appointee to side with the liberal wing in a case many legal conservatives were hoping would deal a major blow to the much-loathed administrative state by overturning decades of precedent allowing federal agencies wide leeway to interpret their own regulations.

Among some conservatives close to Trump, the sense of anger and betrayal was palpable, with some on the right suffering painful flashbacks to Roberts’ 2012 decision to join with the court’s Democratic appointees and uphold Obamacare’s individual mandate even as all of his Republican-appointed colleagues dissented. The anger seemed especially acute with possible abortion-related cases on the horizon for the next term.

There is a degree of selective outrage at Roberts. Trump’s newest nominee to the court, Justice Neil Gorsuch, sided with liberals in a series of 5-4, late-term decisions this year, but they were less high-profile. As Gorsuch ruled in favor of criminal defendants — including a child pornography convict — in a pair of cases related to sentencing, there was no outcry from the right that Trump’s pick was abandoning his backers.

Still, Roberts’ tendency to side with liberals in some cases embraced by many Republican activists seems to grate on many conservative lawyers, including some who helped lead the fight to confirm him.

Levey said the political polarization in the country may be prodding Roberts to go further than he otherwise would in trying to ensure that the court is viewed as moderate and not being buffeted by the political winds. Last November, when President Donald Trump made derisive comments about “Obama judges,” Roberts shot back with a statement declaring “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. ... What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”

“At the end of the day, Roberts wants the court to be well-respected,” Levey said, calling the chief justice “a compromiser and people pleaser.”

“I think the hysteria on the left about an ‘arch conservative’ court is having an effect,” the legal activist said. “At the end of the day, [Roberts] wants the court to be well respected and a highly divided nation is a threat to the legitimacy of the court because with every decision the half the public is convinced the court is acting for political reasons.”