Despite Cantor's Lame Attempts At Rebranding His Decrepit Party, The GOP Wars Against Women And Against Hispanic Rage On

Yesterday, Cantor made a much-heralded speech trying to repackage the Republican Party's toxic agenda in bright, shiny wrapping paper. He failed miserably as the reality of the GOP War Against Women and War Against Hispanics came home to roost. No one wants Cantor's shilly-shallying bullshit while Republicans in the Senate vote against women, Republican leaders in the House refuse to allow a vote at all in fear that the Violence Against Women Act will pass, and the highest ranking Republican in America, John Boehner, announces that even if he's OK with letting some Hispanics and Asians stay in America, he's opposed to a-- any-- path to citizenship! How's that for a day of rebranding?

Monday, 8 Republican Senators tried to stop the Senate from even taking up the Violence Against Women Act again. 85 senators voted against them and their anti-women bigotry. The right-wing extremist die-hards?

• Ted Cruz (R-TX)
• Mike Johanns (R-NE)
• Mike Lee (R-UT)
• Rand Paul (R-KY)
• Jim Risch (R-ID)
• Pat Roberts (R-KS)
• Marco Rubio (R-FL)
• Tim Scott (R-SC)

The GOP idea of a Violence Against Women act is to arm everyone with an assault rifle. That isn't going over very well. When mainstream conservative Steve LaTourette of Ohio was in Congress until a few weeks ago he had an "A" rating from the NRA. Now he's the president of the conservative Main Street Partnership and he's warning his former House colleagues that they're blowing it with women. “I think the Republican Party, at its peril, is seen as in the pocket of the NRA and not willing to engage in the conversation. We haven’t fixed our problem as a party with women. And women don’t quite understand why the Republican Party, in my opinion, is so resistant to doing what the Supreme Court said in the Heller decision … that yes, the Second Amendment is an individual right that needs to be protected just like the right to free speech and the right to have a jury trial but you can have reasonable regulations upon that right... To just say, ‘No, we’re not even going to have a conversation,’ that’s a perception [the GOP] shouldn’t have." But they do.

Even before Cantor dragged his ass up on stage to try the fatuous repackaging job, anti-Hispanic bigot Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), Boehner's pick to head the Judiciary Committee convened the first hearing since President Obama asked Congress to get serious about comprehensive immigration reform. Virtually all Goodlatte did was find a bunch of racist pigs as "expert witnesses" to testify against reform. Goodlatte is vociferously opposed to a path to citizenship and he doesn't want to hear from witnesses who disagree. Among his "experts" are Jessica Vaughan, who heads the Center for Immigration Studies, a right-wing anti-immigrant hate group, notorious racist Julie Myers Wood, who failed miserably as Bush's head of ICE, Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, who insists that there is no need for more working visas, and the lunatic fringe head of Immigration Customs Enforcement, Christopher Crane, who's busy suing President Obama for not deporting enough Hispanics. Goodlatte told the Washington Post's Greg Sargent that, basically, what we’re debating here is “some kind of legal status,” and a chance at “being a fuller part of our society.” Translation: Only second class legal status will be acceptable to House Republicans.

Cantor, meanwhile, said this morning that he thinks Marco Rubio’s plan (which contains a path to citizenship, contingent on strict enforcement triggers) is “the right direction,” but he stopped short of endorsing that path. (Curiously, this comes on the same day that Cantor is set to give a speech “softening” the GOP’s image, something which has suffered in no small part from its immigration policies.)

Raul Grijalva, on MSNBC with Melissa Harris-Perry helped explain why some Republicans are sniffing around the margins of mainstream policy on immigration reform: "Frankly, the beating the Republicans took in this last election in the Latino community, and in the Asian community as well, is the barometer of the future, and they know it. And so whether it’s by heartfelt instinct that my Republican colleagues are coming to the issue of comprehensive immigration reform or expediency-- political expediency-- I really don’t care. This is a chance to do something that’s right, and it’s been a long time coming. Much sacrifice, much frustration, much heartache in our communities. Immigration is not the only issue for Latinos, but it became the moral compass in this last election.”