In another move aimed at aiding his re-election, President Obama on Tuesday announced that Cecilia Munoz, a former senior vice president of the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), would replace Melody Barnes as head of his Domestic Policy Council.
[…]The NCLR, whose name translates as “the race,” is a tax-exempt nonprofit that describes itself as “the largest national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States.” It most recently led in vocal opposition against Arizona SB 1070, a law attacked by Attorney General Eric Holder as a discriminatory incarnation of profiling that usurped federal authority over immigration policy.
When then-candidate Obama spoke to the NCLR national convention in 2008, he told the group what it wanted to hear — that Latino “communities are terrorized by ICE immigration raids.” He also condemned those “communities taking immigration enforcement into their own hands,” such as those that have passed state laws or local ordinances to check that those who are here are in fact here legally.
At this year’s La Raza convention, Obama touted the federal Dream (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) Act, a thinly disguised amnesty program that is part of “comprehensive immigration reform” designed to pit those who have successfully eluded the border patrol on a path to citizenship.
Munoz has been serving since January 2009 as director of the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs at the time of that appointment. She was La Raza’s vice president for research, advocacy and legislation.
Since her entering the Obama administration, according to the watchdog group Judicial Watch, federal funding for La Raza has increased dramatically. In fiscal 2008, NCLR received $2.8 million in federal grants, and in fiscal 2009 it got $4.1 million. In 2010, the total rocketed to more than $11 million.
[…]La Raza has ties it refuses to condemn with groups such as MECHa, which has spent the last three decades indoctrinating Latino students on American campuses, claiming that California, Arizona, Mexico, Texas and southern Colorado were stolen and should be returned to their rightful owners, the people of Mexico.
MECHa’s slogan is derived from the rhetoric of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro: “Through the race, everything; outside the race, nothing.”
Quin Hilyer explains, in the pro-Romney National Review, of all places.
Excerpt:
On taxes, for instance, Santorum has always been superb. The Club for Growth’s white paper on Santorum, calling his tax stances “very strong,” confirms that “Santorum has consistently supported broad-based tax cuts and opposed tax increases either by sponsoring key legislation or by casting votes on relevant bills.”
His record on a host of other conservative issues is as solid as that of any politician in the past two decades. He has been firmly and repeatedly against all sorts of regulatory abuse, against McCain-Feingold and other restrictions on political speech, for school choice, for tort reform, for a strong military, and for a balanced-budget amendment.
Obviously he has been as stalwart a defender of social conservatism, for 20 full years, as any other public figure. And as virtually every conservative involved in the judicial wars during Santorum’s time in the Senate has confirmed, in person or in print, Santorum and his staff were the go-to people in the Senate when you needed to find tireless, committed advocates for conservative jurists. Santorum is, wrote Ed Whelan of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, “the candidate in whom I have by far the greatest confidence” in terms of how likely he would be “to appoint excellent Supreme Court justices and lower-court judges and to work tenaciously to get them confirmed.”
Meanwhile, as Santorum frequently (and entirely accurately) reminds anybody who will listen, his work on the single most important conservative policy reform of the past half century, the 1996 welfare-to-work effort that cut spending and poverty rates simultaneously, was seminal, indefatigable, and remarkably effective. Iowa’s Sen. Chuck Grassley explained to the Des Moines Register a week ago that he was unconvinced about welfare reform until Santorum paid him an office call and “took a lot of time to convince me of his point of view… The sincerity and effort that he has to get his point across in the presidential campaign is almost a total reflection of how he operated as a United States senator.” Grassley yielded and voted for reform.
More broadly, until Rep. Paul Ryan’s recent prominence, nobody in Congress has been as passionate and fearless an advocate for entitlement reform as Santorum. Medicaid block grants. Investment accounts for Social Security. Medicare payments controlled by the beneficiaries rather than third-party payers. Choice rather than government mandates. Indeed, Santorum was the first candidate this year to fully embrace Ryan’s proposed reforms — with this exception, as he reminded me in a phone interview on Thursday: “I’ve criticized Ryan on one thing: waiting ten years [for many of the reforms to kick in]. We can’t afford to wait. We’ve got to start now.”
[…]As for overall spending and his much-discussed history of support for “earmarks” (a position also shared by tightwad Ron Paul), conservative groups’ ratings show that Santorum was better than the average Republican, despite representing a state far bluer than those of most of his Republican colleagues. He demonstrated particular courage in his support for the Freedom to Farm Act and in frequent opposition to floor amendments that would have put additional spending in appropriations bills. Denizens of Capitol Hill in the 1990s fondly remember Santorum’s repeated use of a prop during floor debate called the “Spendometer,” which he used to make a persuasive (and entertaining) case against wasteful federal largesse.
Out of office, he vociferously opposed TARP, the various “stimulus” packages, and the bailouts of car companies and of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. All those stances were perfectly in line with the voting record he had established in the House and Senate.
Social conservative leader and former presidential candidate Gary Bauer will endorse Rick Santorum in South Carolina, he confirmed to The Hill on Saturday.
Bauer said that he didn’t want to get into the details of the endorsement since it was officially still embargoed, but confirmed his support and said he’ll work to get other social conservatives on board for Santorum.
“I want to do whatever I can to convince my colleagues that Sen. Santorum is the right man,” he told The Hill.
[…]Bauer has organized a Friday meeting with top social conservatives in Texas to see if they can coalesce behind one candidate. He said the point of the meeting is not to try to stop Mitt Romney from being the Republican nominee, but that he believes Santorum would be the best candidate to beat President Obama, as well as the best commander in chief.
It’s worth remembering what Rick Santorum did to encourage critical thinking in public school science education, too. This is good news for us who want to have evidence for and against things like naturalistic macro-evolution and anthropogenic catastrophic global warming presented to students. That’s above and beyond the basics of conservatism, right there – and he’s solid on school choice.
The best thing about Santorum, though, is that he has a working class background and he isn’t afraid to debate with people instead of just speaking about his beliefs and generalities. He tries to convince people, and to reason things out with them.
WINTERY KNIGHT 