The Hispanic Situation

 

I find myself agreeing with Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings more often than not, but he is totally clueless about what happened in the most recent Dallas City Council elections. Before the election, three Hispanics served on the council. Then that august body got together, like it’s required to do every 10 years, and redrew its district boundary lines with the aim of electing four Hispanics to the council. When the dust cleared and the new council was inaugurated Monday, it contained two Hispanic members.

Rawlings said in his speech at the ceremony (it was technically not an "inaugural address" because he was not up for re-election) that the problem is that the city charter needs to be "tweaked" to improve the way the council redraws the district boundaries. He said the current method is too messy and too "political."

"We must minimize politics and maximize effectiveness to achieve racial representation with geographical tightness to keep our neighborhoods’ integrity high," he said.

Hate to tell you this, Mayor Mike, but eggs will be taken out of omelettes before politics is taken out of redistricting. It is, by definition, a political process.

Look, Mayor Mike, why do you think Republicans in the House of Representatives aren’t afraid to oppose immigration reform? Why, when all the pundits say Republicans will never get the Hispanic vote unless they change their ways, do despots like Republican Ted Cruz, the shameful representative of our own border state, continue to fight immigration reform every chance he gets?

Because Cruz and the other ideologues like him have realized something Mayor Mike still hasn’t come to grips with: Hispanics don’t vote.

Now I’ve heard all kinds of reasons for this, some which even have a shred of legitimacy, but the fact remains that, by and large, the Hispanic population doesn’t go to the polls on election day as other groups do.

So instead of wasting time trying to find ways to "tweak" the city council, the mayor should put together a task force, headed by state Rep. Rafael Anchia, to discover and then implement ways to get the Hispanic population to the polls. And because this should be expanded to a statewide effort, I would nominate San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro to join Anchia at the head of this task force.

And this effort should begin immediately.