Mi Casa, Sue Casa
Nancy Pelosi tries to force the Salvation Army to hire people who can't speak English.

Monday, November 19, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST

It's been less than a week since New York's Sen. Hillary Clinton and Gov. Eliot Spitzer had to climb down from their support of driver's licenses for illegal aliens. Now House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has moved to kill an amendment that would protect employers from federal lawsuits for requiring their workers to speak English. Among the employers targeted by such lawsuits: the Salvation Army.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, a moderate Republican from Tennessee, is dumbstruck that legislation he views as simple common sense would be blocked. He noted that the full Senate passed his amendment to shield the Salvation Army by 75-19 last month, and the House followed suit with a 218-186 vote just this month. "I cannot imagine that the framers of the 1964 Civil Rights Act intended to say that it's discrimination for a shoe shop owner to say to his or her employee, 'I want you to be able to speak America's common language on the job,' " he told the Senate last Thursday.

But that's exactly what the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is trying to do. In March the EEOC sued the Salvation Army because its thrift store in Framingham, Mass., required its employees to speak English on the job. The requirement was clearly posted and employees were given a year to learn the language. The EEOC claimed the store had fired two Hispanic employees for continuing to speak Spanish on the job. It said that the firings violated the law because the English-only policy was not "relevant" to job performance or safety.

"If it is not relevant, it is discriminatory, it is gratuitous, it is a subterfuge to discriminate against people based on national origin," says Rep. Charles Gonzalez of Texas, one of several Hispanic Democrats in the House who threatened to block Ms. Pelosi's attempts to curtail the Alternative Minimum Tax unless she killed the Alexander amendment.

The confrontation on the night of Nov. 8 was ugly. Members of the Hispanic Caucus initially voted against the rule allowing debate on a tax bill that included the AMT "patch," which for a year would protect some 23 million Americans from being kicked into a higher income tax bracket.

Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, a moderate from Maryland, was beside himself. Congressional Quarterly reports that he jabbed his finger on the House floor at Joe Baca, the California Democrat who chairs the Hispanic Caucus, and yelled, "How dare you destroy this party? This will be the worst loss in 10 years."

Mr. Baca was having none of it. "You see this on the [voting] board?," he yelled back. "This is against me. This is against me personally." Luckily for Democrats, C-Span's microphones did not pick up the exchange. But it was audible to reporters in the press gallery. They also heard Rep. Luis Gutierrez of Illinois say that English-only efforts were symbolic of "bigotry and prejudice" against those who speak other languages.

After testy negotiations, the Hispanic Caucus finally agreed to let the tax bill proceed after extracting a promise from Ms. Pelosi that the House will not vote on the bill funding the Justice and Commerce Departments unless the English-only protection language is dropped. "There ain't going to be a bill" with the Alexander language, Mr. Baca has told reporters.

Sen. Alexander says that if that's the case, "thousands of small businesses across America will have to show there is some special reason to justify requiring their employees to speak our country's common language on the job." He notes that the number of EEOC actions against English-only policies grew to some 200 last year from 32 a decade ago. In an attempt at compromise, he has offered watered-down language that would still allow the EEOC to file many actions, but he says House Democrats rejected it.

Mr. Alexander says his battle is about far more than what language is spoken on a shop floor. "The EEOC actions turn diversity, our greatest strength, against the interests of our common future as Americans," he told me.

The late Albert Shanker, head of the American Federation of Teachers, once pointed out that public schools were established in this country largely "to help mostly immigrant children learn the three R's and what it means to be an American, with the hope that they would go home and teach their parents the principles in the Constitution and the Declaration that unite us."

Mr. Alexander says that noble effort is in danger of being undermined: "We have spent the last 40 years in our country celebrating diversity at the expense of unity. One way to create that unity is to value, not devalue, our common language, English."

The battle over Mr. Alexander's amendment is about whether a consensus that used to unite liberals and conservatives in this country can continue to hold. If it can't, expect the issue to become a flashpoint in the 2008 elections. Republicans have their political problems with Hispanics over some of their approaches to illegal immigration, but they may be nothing compared to the problems Democrats have if they continue to cave in to their anti-assimilation extremists.

That's why they call them farking liberals. They are always trying to fark America.

lol nice source......

ALL of you guys without sources are almost as bad as posters who clog up this forum with this crap.........both liberal and conservative, democrap and republicant.....

Please help us to source whatever it is you cut and paste for discussion.......lol

OMFG...I can cut and paste too......

if you talk politics....source your info...

Why Spanish is the favored new language of Politics-SOURCE

Why Spanish is the favored new language of politics
With a new summer program on Capitol Hill, GOP pushes for key - and contested - voter group.

By Kris Axtman | Staff writer of The Christian Science

HOUSTON –
Sen. Sam Brownback (R) of Kansas admits his accent is about as flat as the prairie outside his family farm. That is why, perhaps, he often receives quizzical looks when working on his latest Capitol Hill assignment: speaking Spanish.

"I do butcher a number of words," he says. "A Kansas Midwestern accent doesn't always have the easiest time with some of these rapid Spanish phrases."



With Congress in recess, Senator Brownback and a spate of GOP leaders are spending free time printing vocabulary on flashcards and muttering in the backseats of cars, conjugating verbs in low mumbles.

The reason: Spanish is increasingly important to their party's survival. So they're flocking to Spanish classes to communicate, if only rudimentarily, with constit-uents - in an effort to reach into Hispanic homes and relay political concerns.

Feeling comfortable at Hispanic functions - and confident with a smattering of phrases - has spurred congressional Republicans' most ambitious effort to date at mastering the Spanish tongue. Part of that attempt is Spanish on the Hill, a 10-week course held Wednesday mornings while Congress is in session. This summer saw its largest GOP contingency yet.

Brownback, who took the course, has since mixed a few Spanish phrases into his speeches and begun crafting a Spanish soundbite for radio interviews. But he's learning the most, he says, by just approaching Spanish speakers on the street.

"I go up and say hello, and then they try to teach me something new," says Brownback. "Usually I have to say, 'OK, let me think for a second about what that means.'"

Other lawmakers have taken short, intense trips south of the border to language schools. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas is the latest to take this route. He's spending the week studying Spanish in Cuernavaca, Mexico, after promoting his guest-worker legislation in Mexico City last week.

Nor are Democrats - who attract a larger share of the Hispanic vote - sitting idle. Spouting Spanish is so de rigueur for presidential candidates that Yankees Howard Dean and Sen. John Kerry have both given parts of speeches in Spanish.

But for Republicans, language lessons seem especially important, as the ability to tap growing minority groups goes to the very future of their party.

"The Republican Party has been pretty homogeneous and white for a long time, and they are realizing that they are going to have to adapt to changing circumstances to stay in power," says F. Chris Garcia, a political science professor at the University of New Mexico.

The biggest changing circumstance is the recent announcement that Hispanics are now America's largest ethnic minority. And most of those who vote are bilingual, says Dr. Garcia.

But Republicans have a long way to go. Hispanics have consistently voted Democratic - about 68 percent for Democratic presidential candidates and 70 percent for Democratic congressional candidates.

There have been exceptions, of course, and the most prominent one is the most current: President Bush won with about 35 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2000, making party history when he stumped in Spanish, hired Spanish-speakers for all media-relations departments in the US government, and became the first president to give a radio address in Spanish. Now GOP leaders say their agenda appeals to many Hispanics, with issues such as economic opportunity, better schools, home-ownership, quality health care, and family and faith.

"Hispanic values are really Republican values," says Ben Fallon, a spokesman for Rep. Jerry Weller, who launched the Spanish on the Hill classes. "We just haven't done a good job of communicating our values to the Hispanic community."

These days, learning the language is billed as the first step in communicating those values - a step that, for many politicians, has been half stumble. "These are men and woman who've been very successful, and it's a little funny to watch such powerful people struggling to learn something new," says Mr. Fallon of the 29 members of Congress in classes.

Still, the ability to turn a few Spanish phrases - "Vote for me," "I'm a Republican" - may be more symbol than substance.

"For both parties, to grow the base of support is going to depend on their public policies," says Tatcho Mindiola, associate professor of sociology and director of the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Houston. "That is far more important than whether you can say a few phrases phonetically in Spanish."

And beneath the phonemes, dissonance and discord remain. One Republican policy unpopular with Hispanics, according to Dr. Mindiola, was Bush's filing of a brief opposed to the University of Michigan's affirmative-action admission policy, recently upheld by the US Supreme Court. Bush and the Hispanic community also part ways on bilingual education and strong federal government.

But no matter the persistence of those divisions, GOP inroads into the Hispanic community will likely increase pressure on Democrats, traditionally the party minorities favor. And Republican efforts to learn Spanish are just one step.

"Hispanics generally appreciate any effort to show respect for their culture, and using Spanish is a way to honor that culture," says Garcia. "But it's going to take ... sustained actions on policy issues."

And that, he adds, is the real dilemma - for while phonemes come easily, softening its stance on policy issues could shake the traditional Republican base.

For Brownback, the simple desire to communicate with more constituents is reason enough to learn Spanish: "Learning their language gives me a window on their culture, too."


BREAK

it's that easy...

p.s. These are being made into bumper stickers, if anybody is interested.

I bet my ma 20 bucks she wouldn't get the nomination.

Hey fontman where can I get one of those?

well its nice to see a tn senaoer trying to set some things right....too bad the defeatocrats rule. at least he is doing his job