Last week when I wrote about the state version of the DREAM Act passing the Washington State House, I was cautiously optimistic:
I’m glad that this has passed with bipartisan support. Hopefully the lopsided nature of the vote and the number of Republicans supporting it means that it has a shot in the Senate.
One of the biggest hurdles was getting to committee in the GOP controlled Senate. And now it looks like at least that will happen.
The Wash. Senate Higher Education Committee has scheduled a hearing on the Dream Act for next Thursday, 3/28, per spokeswoman. #waleg
— Brian M. Rosenthal (@brianmrosenthal) March 21, 2013
So, here are the members of the Senate Higher Education Committee. The forces of basic human decency just have to peal one Republican (or Rodney Tom), so if you see your Senator, you might want to give them a call or an email. If they aren’t your Senator, it’s firstname.lastname@leg.wa.gov, but probably don’t mention that they aren’t your Senator. If it gets through then presumably they’d be able to find some GOP members like it did in the House.
It probably should pass the Senate, because over the past couple of weeks we’ve seen a lot of Republicans nationally coming out in favor of some form of immigration plan which provides a pathway to citizenship.
It’s not because Republicans feel an overriding sense of compassion or justice to their fellow immigrants (we are, after all, a nation of immigrants). It’s because they finally did the math and realized that the demographics weren’t going to allow them to appeal only to the older white guys to vote for them any more (and tell their women how to vote, as well). They are hoping to take over the Hispanic vote by reversing course after several years of anti-Hispanic hysteria.
It’s quite a sea-change from the last four years, in which GOP has tried just about everything they could to single out hispanic voters as targets. Local politicians appealed to the prejudices and hatred of white Republican voters, enacted laws which virtually made it illegal to drive/walk while looking different from other citizens, and required hispanics to “carry their papers” proving their citizenship should they ever be stopped by the police. Republican tea-party activists and Fox News commentators even argued for changing the 14th Amendment so that children born in the U.S. of non-citizens could be deprived of citizenship.
And then they wondered why Hispanic voters were avoiding them in vast numbers.
So, I would expect that the word would go out that there is a new party line (literally) on the subject of immigration reform, and the act will pass.