In the 2004 presidential election, George W. Bush received 44 percent of the Hispanic vote. Probably nothing about the election shocked the Democrats more except the fact that they lost.

Political strategist Dick Morris credited Hispanic support for Bush as the decisive factor in his election. "The biggest reason for Bush's victory was that he finally cracked the Democratic stranglehold on the Hispanic vote" (11/5/04 NewsMax).

From the very beginning, the Bush White House put Hispanic political outreach high on its priority list. Bush sought to make a friend of Mexican President Vincente Fox. Hispanic leaders, especially evangelicals, were invited to meet with the president and top members of the administration.

It didn't hurt that the Supreme Court decision securing Bush's 2000 victory was announced on December 12, the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

The 2004 election results showed that the president had succeeded in connecting with the Hispanic community. Sixty-three percent of Hispanic Protestants voted for Bush, even though only 37 percent identified themselves as Republican. (About 23 percent of Hispanics are Protestant.)

Thirty-one percent of Hispanic Catholics voted for Bush, while only 13 percent identified themselves as Republican.

These numbers, significantly up from the 2000 election, represented a nightmare for the Democratic Party, which had depended upon the loyalty of ethnic minorities for its base.

Hispanics make up 9 percent of the electorate but are growing faster than any other group. Already the 29 million Hispanic Catholics outnumber the 22 million white mainline Protestants.

Anyone in Washington, D. C. would have had to be comatose for the past six years not to realize that the Hispanic vote would come to determine the ability of either party to win future elections.

The GOP, therefore, had good reason to breathe easily until now.

As The Window reported on March 16, 2006, a House bill on immigration, co-sponsored by Congressman F. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) and Peter King (R-NY), elicited an immediate condemnation by the Archbishop of Los Angeles, Roger Cardinal Mahony. Mahony urged bishops, priests, and the Catholic laity to disobey the law if it passed the Senate and was signed by the president.

Mahony specifically objected to language in the bill that seemed to criminalize the Church's social services that house and feed undocumented immigrants. As explained by Congressman King in the previous Window, it was never the intention of the bill to stop the Church from helping immigrants.

But it was too late. Cardinal Mahony's angry denunciation was echoed quickly throughout the Church, through homilies and diocesan newspapers. In a matter of days, Hispanics were protesting in the streets of major American cities in numbers unparalleled in our history. An estimated 500,000 marched in Los Angeles alone.

Lost in the noise was the fact that President Bush's "guest worker" program, introduced in early 2004, contained nothing of the inflammatory language of the Sensenbrenner-King bill. The Senate immigration bill, co-sponsored by Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Ted Kennedy (D-MA), with broad bi-partisan support, amounts to a virtual amnesty. (The U. S. Catholic Conference supports the McCain-Kennedy bill.)

Because of public reaction to the House bill, the GOP appears to be at the brink of repeating its mistake of the nineteenth century - becoming, or at least appearing to be, the anti-immigrant party.

Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fl) is very, very concerned. He delivered a strong message to other Republican senators earlier this week. As an immigrant from Cuba at the age of 16 in 1962, Martinez has the background and experience to tell the GOP how it is endangering its outreach to Hispanic voters for years to come.

President Bush, who appointed Martinez as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development during his first term, understands this or he would not have recommended a "guest worker" program in the first place. Former RNC chairman Ed Gillespie warned fellow Republicans that "anti-immigration rhetoric is a political siren song" that must be resisted.

Yet, at this moment in time, the Republican Party risks losing ground both with Hispanic voters and non-Hispanic Catholic voters who sympathize with their plight.

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