https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/news/2010-07-23/welcome-to-el-partido-de-t/

Welcome to El Partido de Té

By Richard Whittaker, July 23, 2010, 8:00am, Newsdesk

Sometimes the contemporary right's schizophrenia can boggle the mind. Take this week: On one hand, the Republican Party of Texas launched its Hispanic Republicans of Texas political action committee on Tuesday. On the other hand, a large slab of the Texas Congressional delegation signed up for Congresswoman Michelle Bachman's new Tea Party Caucus.

No surprise, really. After all, the Texas GOP recently passed a platform that opposes Real ID but wants immigration status printed on driving licenses, claims to be pro-education but opposes "government sponsored programs that deal with early childhood development" (seriously) and that believes in the rights of citizens but doesn't want people to be citizens just because they were born here. Who can keep all that straight in their heads?

It all drags up memories of one of the most extraordinary sights of the last legislative session. Around the time that House Democrats were fighting to kill a racially charged voter ID bill, Republican Sen. John Cornyn was having lunch with the Mexican American Legislative Caucus. It was a landmark moment because it was the first time a sitting US senator had broken bread with MALC. Inevitably the question of the hour was why Cornyn had decided this was the moment to pass the butter.

The subtext of the lunch (which was still cordial) was that everyone knew that this was an attempt to reach out to Hispanic voters. The catchphrase of Texas campaign pros is that "Demographics is destiny" and, with an increasing proportion of the electorate ticking the "Mexican, Mexican Am., Chicano" box on its census returns, the Texas GOP is staring down the barrel of a grim reality: That, after decades of race baiting, they have to start playing nice with a section of the population that has ended up demonized as a by-product of their policies. And "by-product" is the generous way to look at it.

It's not the easiest time for the Republican Party to try this. The claims that there is no racist component to the Tea Party are about as convincing as the claim that there will be no racial profiling as a result of Arizona's unconstitutional "papers please bill. Oh, and add on top of that the fact that Andrew Breitbart has now admitted that the attempt to slime Shirley Sherrod was just a tit-for-tat attack on the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Such smears are a diversionary tactic, and what's worrying is that this seems to be standard operating procedure, as shown by the recent attempts to reduce Sen. Robert Byrd's career to his filibustering of the Civil Rights Act. What's distressing, as shown by the way the USDA panicked over Sherrod, is that far too often it seems to work. However, for the GOP's Hispanic outreach program to work will require either some serious short-term memory loss or a lot of sins to be forgiven by the sinned against.

Fortunately, it's not like the Texas GOP would go and do anything like adding opposition to bilingual education after a student's third year to their platform. Wait, what, they did that? Oh, boy.