This blog is cross-posted at StewartAcuff.com
As Republican Strategist Steve Schmidt said the day after House right-wing radical Republicans defeated any effort for immigration reform, we have to be a national party, and we have to appeal to all Americans including Latinos and African-Americans. With Speaker John Boehner’s refusal (and the refusal of his entire caucus) to consider the Senate immigration Bill, he just wrote off the votes of thousands and thousands of not only Latino voters, but thousands or millions of immigrant workers and their communities from all over the world.
Couple that with the right-wing radical Republican Supreme Court decision to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act passed and signed into law in 1965 primarily to protect the franchise and voting rights of African-Americans, and you have a double whammy of self inflicted wounds that threaten to make this Republican Party all but irrelevant for a generation.
Many right-wing Republicans will argue that those communities and constituencies are impossible for them to win anyway.
Without litigating that point, the collateral damage to the right-wing Republican Party are the independents, suburban voters and swing voters who believe this is a better country than that, those who believe a true democracy requires the largest franchise and a large active political base – not a small number of self-absorbed white voters.
This white, mainly Southern strategy has had enough success that it is very hard for them to break. The Tea Party only makes it harder.
Our job as progressives is to talk about, write about, and force these facts into the entire electorate.
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