Caucus leaders are effectively suggesting they don’t consider that segment of their community Latino at all.
Mayra Flores, the Mexican-born Republican congresswoman who won an upset victory in Texas’s heavily Latino 34th congressional district this summer, has been rejected from membership in the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. The “most influential Hispanic group of lawmakers on Capitol Hill,” the Texas Tribune reported, “is entirely made up of Democrats — including five from Texas”:
It was originally founded in 1976 as a bipartisan working group of Hispanic lawmakers in both chambers of Congress. But in the 1990s, differences over the U.S.’s Cuba policy led to a fissure between the group’s Republican and Democratic members. The Republicans led by Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart, R-Florida, left to form the similarly named Congressional Hispanic Conference in 2003.
Since then, the two groups have kept to their own parties. Congressional Hispanic Caucus bylaws now explicitly block Republicans from joining, Sebastian Roa, a caucus spokesperson, said. “Rep. Flores’ Extreme MAGA values and their attacks on Latinos and our nation’s democracy on January 6 do not align with CHC values,” he added.
Flores said she’d hoped to join the caucus as a way to work across the aisle and foster bipartisanship, she said in her tweet . . . The Congressional Hispanic Caucus is four times bigger than its Republican counterpart.
While Flores explicitly said her interest in the caucus was “to work across the aisle and foster bipartisanship,” the Texas Tribune echoes the Democratic caucus leadership’s allegation that “Flores hasn’t shown signs of being a moderate,” writing: “She is endorsed by former President Donald Trump, maintains a hard line on reproductive rights and has called for more funding for border security.” (Quelle horreur!). If this is the standard, of course, it disqualifies most mainstream Republicans. Which is obviously the point — as the Tribune notes, “Flores isn’t the first Republican to try to join the Congressional Hispanic Caucus since the 2003 schism. Former representative Carlos Curbelo (R., Fla.) also made a bid to join in 2017, offering a presentation to members before they voted to reject his membership.” But Curbelo, it should be noted, was one of the most moderate Republicans in Congress. As McClatchy wrote in 2016:
Curbelo has broken ranks with his party to take lonely stands on high-profile topics ranging from abortion and women’s health to climate change, the environment, immigration and government spending.
He’s voted against defunding Planned Parenthood. He’s voted for climate change regulations pushed by President Barack Obama but opposed by most Republicans. He’s voted against cutting benefits for workers who are in the U.S. illegally. He’s opposed shutting down the government as a way to enforce fiscal discipline. He’s voted to protect funding for medical and scientific research. Curbelo’s votes, along with the bills he’s introduced or co-sponsored, have earned him a reputation as a moderate. In some quarters, he’s even considered that strange sort of political animal, a relatively liberal Republican.
A graph by GovTrack, a nonpartisan website that monitors Congress, places a dot representing each member of the House along an ideological spectrum from left to right. Only 10 of its 247 Republicans fall to the left of Curbelo.
If that kind of Republican is too far right for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, then every Republican is too far right for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. So its leaders — and their allies in the media — can spare us the lecture about Flores’s “Extreme MAGA values.” Any claim to bipartisan legitimacy was sacrificed when the caucus deemed one of the most liberal and bipartisan-minded Republicans in Congress out of bounds for membership. (Curbelo “co-founded and co-chaired the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus, served in a leadership role in the Problem Solvers Caucus,” according to his bio at the Bipartisan Policy Center.) The name of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus suggests that it represents the interests of Hispanics generally, and not just those of Democratic Hispanics. About a third of American Hispanics are Republicans. Caucus leaders are effectively excluding that segment from the Hispanic community.