Bothersome Texas Politics: 100 Bills To Control Latinos

By Dr. Henry Flores

I simply don’t know how to think of what is happening in the contemporary Texas political environment but it kind of worries me on various levels.  Some folks have created a saying that what Texas looks like today is the way the remainder of the country will look like in the future.  This is not good!  If this saying carries any weight then we all need to be very worried.

Let me begin by speaking about an interesting phenomenon from both the scientific and everyday world.  It has been concluded, by reputable weather historians, physicists, and meteorologists that climate change explains the extreme heat we’ve been having in Texas the last few years.  Us native Texans know that our summers have always been hot but not like they have been lately.  Last summer the month of July averaged more than 100 degrees per day.  Depending upon whose estimate you look at we’ve been suffering drought conditions from anywhere from three to seven years.  Traditional industries like cattle and cotton are dwindling away if not already practically disappeared.  If prognosticators are correct, the rest of the United States will start burning up very soon, if it hasn’t begun so already. I saw a report that already this year we’ve broken more than 20,000 high temperature weather records and it’s barely past the Fourth of July.

In Texas, however, we continue to do the things that are attributed to climate change by relying solely on fossil fuel based energy sources to go about our daily living completely ignoring reality or, at least claiming that  climate change is not a reality and that we are suffering through a weather anomaly.

Although climate change worries me I’m very afraid of what I am encountering on the political/cultural front.  Maybe its because I just finished reading a history of Germany from 1933-1935.  During this pre-WWII era the German government was taken over by the National Socialist Party (Nazis) in a very secretive and underhanded way.  These ideological extremists only represented a small but vocal and well organized numerical minority.  Their political machinations brought Hitler to power.  He never won any elections.  As a matter of fact the most support he received in any election was 38% of the national popular vote.  As soon as the ailing president of the republic passed away, Hitler took power and began bullying the parliament to pass a series of laws designed to control the political opposition.  He had all communists, socialists, and labor leaders interned together with certain intellectuals and religious leaders.  Then, he had parliament pass a series of laws that as a body became known as the Nuremberg Laws.  The laws were named after the city where parliament was meeting.

These laws were passed to deny the right to vote of all Jews, identify who was Jewish, deny them property rights, and restrict their movements.  Eventually Jews were not allowed to own and operate businesses and banks.  In the end Jews from all German-occupied territories were rounded up and either exiled, imprisoned or sent to extermination camps.  As I ploughed through this rich history and the vivid stories of how the American ambassador to Germany in those days tried to cope with the changing face of their politics I was reminded of what went on during our 2011 Texas legislative session.

Did you know that our “esteemed senators and state legislators” put forth 100 bills to control the Latino population, principally immigrants or those who could be confused as immigrants?  Did you know that the bills included three to declare English as the state’s official language?  One bill wanted a list of all children taking bi-lingual education classes.  Another bill was offered to tax all remittances to Mexico, Central and South America!  Not Canada, China, any country in Europe or Africa only countries to our south!  Of course, the “crowning legislative achievement of the 82d Legislature” was the passage of Senate Bill 14, otherwise known as the Voter ID Bill.

Senate Bill 14 was designed originally, at least the superficial rationale was so stated, to deter fraudulent voting particularly perpetrated by the massive wave of undocumented people arriving daily in the state.  I say the superficial rationale because the testimony and evidence that came forth in the recently concluded Texas v Holder law suit uncovered an entirely different story, that the Great State of Texas was using the Voter ID law to suppress the Latino vote.

I’ll get into the substance of my claim in some follow up columns but one thing that simply astonishes me, SB 14 was supported by mostly Anglo Republican legislators (four Latino Republican state representatives voted for it in the house) yet the Republican Party seems to want Latinos to support their presidential candidate.  The GOP even dangles the possibility that their “fair-haired” Latino politician, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, has a chance of being considered a vice-presidential running mate for Mr. Romney.  Of course, this will never happen because Mr. Rubio is not acceptable to the vast majority of Latinos.  So, the best strategy Republicans can follow to try to win the White House in 2012 is to suppress the votes of those populations most likely to vote against them—Latinos, African Americans and young persons.

Nevertheless, as I read through all the evidence simultaneously reading the history surrounding the passage of the Nuremberg Laws I was left with the unsettling feeling that history was repeating itself.