CORNYN AND HUTCHINSON REJECT SOTOMAYOR

By Dan Reyna
We now know that both Texas Republican U.S. senators John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchinson voted to reject Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination for the U.S. Supreme Court, based largely on the now-infamous “Wise Latina” remark.
Cornyn’s umbrage against the alleged diabolical plots of those advocating ethnic diversity in our courts and our government and other institutions flies in the face of his own press releases. The latest is his public service announcement July 27, 2009, where he laments the fate of drought-stricken Texas ranchers and farmers.
Hutchinson apparently feels that Hispanics in Texas will side with her in the upcoming Texas governor’s race regardless of the baseless reasons for her rejection of the first Latino justice to the Supreme Court. Cornyn, facing reelection himself, thinks Hispanic voters will forget.
And, having no tangible relief to offer Texan ranchers and farmers, he succumbs to the handy tool of the ineffective politician – mythology.
Cornyn glosses over the contributions of Spanish and Mexican ranchers and farmers and instead alights on the Old Three Hundred, the 300 Anglo settlers who were brought to Texas by Stephen F. Austin in 1825. From these original family farms, he said, Texas agriculture blossomed under as a result of the industriousness of these hardy pioneers. Their character was in stark contrast to the ranchers and farmers already there who were Mexicans and Spaniards. Feel good yet?
He then goes on to praise the German and Czechs who settled in Central Texas and established small farming communities as paragons of virtue and examples of the hard-work ethic. Unfortunately for Cornyn, those small farms have been gobbled up in time by larger agricultural interests. The family farm, alas, is a thing of the past.
However, it is noteworthy to point out that while he can praise the ethnic background of Anglo farmers as a reason for their success and industriousness, Sotomayor can’t do the same with her Latina background. There is, apparently, a double standard working here.
To set the historical record straight, livestock and agriculture were already underway for more than a half century before Austin’s settlers arrived here. Each was given almost 4,000 acres (plus 177 for subsistence farming) by a Mexican government that only required three promises from them: their allegiance to it, a pledge to become Catholic and to refrain from owning slaves. These upright settlers and bastions of integrity and morality had to do nothing more than to live up to their word.
The did not. When slavery was abolished in Mexico in 1829, a few years after the American arrived, they ignored this pledge and continued to nurture their “peculiar institution.” In 1819, John Quincy Adams representing the United States signed the Adams-Onis Treaty recognizing the Sabine River as the border between Spanish territory and Louisiana. The filibusters like Andrew Jackson and his protégé James Polk (a future president who eventually invaded Mexico) set about to subvert the agreement and flooded the state with (now) illegal U.S. immigrants.
Cowboys did herd hundreds of thousands of cattle from South Texas and to Kansas to spur the cattle industry, but these cattle were not wild. They belonged to the people who had been given land grants by the Spanish crown. When the cowboys – who by the way learned all their skills from Mexican vaqueros – ran out of “wild cattle” they raided northern Mexico and stole them.
Likewise, if not for slave labor, Texan farmers would not have produced the crop that allowed the Confederacy to survive longer than it should have against the Union in the Civil War. In fact, some of these exporters (i.e., Charles Stillman) of cotton used Mexico to bypass the Union blockades and then sold the cotton in New York to the Yankees to amass huge fortunes for themselves. Where was the loyalty to good ol’ Texas?
Today, the agricultural lobby has manipulated the government to the point where almost all crops grown in agribusiness enjoy generous price supports and subsidies. We have no need for a sugar beet or sugar cane industry when the world marked is flooded with sugar. Likewise, new artificial sweeteners make these subsidized crops obsolete and should go the way of the angora wool subsidy that until recently made sheep farmers in San Angelo wealthy producing wool the country didn’t need. Cornyn should stop paying out millions for useless programs that only add a burden to the taxpayer. For example, why not put a stop to set-aside programs that pay some large landowners millions not to plant?
Instead, the junior senator from Texas dusts off old myths that make Europhile Texans yearn for the good old days. There’s only one problem there: drought-stricken livestock and withered crops can’t feed off mythology. But perhaps this senator and governor candidate Hutchinson can pluck another election for themselves.
For this reason, I am asking my friends on either side of the Rio Grande who can vote in Texas elections (and there are hundreds, if not thousands who can) to reject their request for their vote and vote Democrat. These two have shown their true colors.