Do GOP Leaders Need Spanish Lessons?
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in LegislationThe National Hispanic Leadership Agenda (NHLA) has put out their annual Congressional Scorecard and the results don’t look good for Republican leaders.
CapitolBuzz with the story:
The average score for Senate Republicans was 34 percent, and the three top Senate Republican leaders have cast votes that earned them below-average scores from NHLA. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) voted against the interest of Hispanic families two out of three times, with a score of 33 percent; Republican Conference Chair Rick Santorum (R-PA) and Republican Whip Mitch McConnell scored 17 percent on the NHLA Scorecard.
The Democrats faired considerably better, garnering an average score of 95 percent.
You can download the entire report here.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 26th, 2005 and is filed under Legislation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 26th, 2005 at 9:30 pm
Interesting report. One thing that jumps out at me is the number of issues they’ve chosen for the scorecard that focus on undocumented aliens, foreign nationals, and non-English speakers. Naturally that is a concern for a great many Hispanics, but as more and more Hispanics in America move into the middle class and achieve high proficiency in English, I wonder if it’s totally representative.
Same with issues concerning things like access to DNA testing for federal inmates. I know many Hispanics are in the prison population, but isn’t there more to the 32-million member minority than that?
And what’s with the “Marriage Protection Act” being part of the ranking? How on earth is that — or one opinion about that — a measure of Hispanic sympathies?
Other things seem curiously omitted. How did Congressmen vote on health plans that included tax breaks for small businesses? Hispanics are forming small businesses at three times the rate of the rest of the country.
July 26th, 2005 at 10:52 pm
I agree in theory, but I’d rather see a poll that demonstrates that. I would be completely guessing if that’s the case.
However, a good portion of our economy is propped up by this “hidden” labor force, and I can’t imagine that the legal Hispanic population turns a blind eye towards them. It’s probably the opposite in fact.
They said in their methodology that the issues had to be reached by a consensus of the members that conducted the study, so further details would have to be gleaned from who those people are and where their politics lie.
In any event, I presented it because the gap seemed pretty wide. And given the GOP said it was a priority to reach out to Hispanic voters, those numbers are pretty poor.
July 27th, 2005 at 12:49 am
Looking at their report, I can only conclude that the “key votes” were highly selected to reach the desired outcome.
This is classic move by idealogues: (1) redefine words to mean what you want, then (2) come to conclusions that you have predefined and preordained. Then of course push your results as some great revelation.
The whole consular card issue (included in one of the “key votes”) is a stellar example: groups like LaRaza oppose it because it is against *their* agenda, whether or not is is good for the country as a whole (latino and non-latino.)
Dan