TOO-WILLING DUPES LOPEZ, HINOJOSA, SUCIO LUCIO, SELL OUT LA GENTE TO PRO-GUN, PRO-WALL, TRUMP REPUBLICANS

Special to El Rrun-Rrun

The Republicans in Austin and Washington knew how to attract Democrats-in-name only charlatans like 32-year District 27 Texas Senator Eddie "Sucio Lucio Jr. over to their side.

Dangle a few dollars, let him sit on some important committees where his vote was sure to be outvoted by Republicans and you had him eating out of your hand.

And now, as he faces retirement at the end of the year, Lucio is showing all the Democrats in South Texas – the majority of them Hispanics – that he willingly duped them for 36 years running as a Democrat for state representative and senator while all along he has sided with his predominantly white Republican patrones.

Republicans relish blatant contradictions to befuddle gullible voters. 

They blithely claim that Sucio, our "very best Democrat," is endorsing Trump-obsessed Mayra Mentiras Flores, and urge Democrat voters to "look past our political history" and vote for her to the U.S. House of Representatives District 34 instead of for the Democratic Party standard bearer Vicente Gonzalez.

Well, now, maybe Flores wasn't really lying when she called Democrats "traitors," was she? Dangle enough money and personal and political favors and you'll have them lining up like Lucio at the cheese line for the crumbs that fall from the Republican table.

If it worked for Lucio, why not for the rest?

Now we see that the Associate Republicans of Texas (ART) have caught on to the idea and are hoping that if you throw enough money toward South Texas, enough Democratic voters will be willing – like Sucio and his pals – to overlook their MAGA platforms which favor absolutist gun-rights over human life, white nationalist yearning to "conserve" their privilege over minorities and women, to control a woman's right to choose what to do with her own body, and embrace conspiracy theories like "Stop the Steal" and calling the January 6 insurrectionist mob patriots who were merely "engaged in vigorous political discourse."

So far, according to campaign federal finance reports, the ART has dumped $1.49 million in nine races where seven candidates are Hispanics, like Sucio, and only two are not. In our area, Janie Lopez, running for the District 37 against Democrat Luis Villarreal, has been the beneficiary of $247,000 in the last 30 days.

And in those same last 30 days they have thrown a $213,000 bone to Nueces County's Adam Hinojosa who is running against Democrat Morgan LaMantia for Sucio's Senate District 27.

Lopez, a board member of the San Benito Consolidated Independent School District, has garnered the highest ranking of the National Rifle Association, which means that she is against any common-sense gun safety legislation, exhaustive background checks on gun purchasers, and against raising the legal age to buy assault weapons like the one used at Rabb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas where 19 elementary children and two teachers were massacred by a gunman who had just turned 18.

This from a school board member who lives in the same region of Texas where the Republican governor and Republican-dominated legislature choose to protect the Second Amendment rights of the gunman over the right of unarmed elementary-school children and teachers to live. 

The Republican Congressional Leadership fund, in their appeal for donations for Flores, make no bones about where she stands. They ask for money so the "Pro-Trump, Pro-Wall, Mexican American can hold her seat in a critical border district!"

Flores spent $3,472,862 to win the June special election called by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott against Dan Sanchez for District 34, most of it from Republican PACs from outside the Texas, according to Open Secrets. 

With the final campaign reports still unavailable, it is difficult to know what the final Republican investment on her candidacy to flip traditionally-blue South Texas red. But you can bet your bottom peso that it will be more than the $3.5 million they spent to beat Dan Sanchez in the special election.

The Republican narrative has taken on an insidiously regressive tone. In the Flores race against Gonzalez for U.S. District 34, they paint the Democrat defense attorney as being against "you" and for "them," saying that as an attorney who – like his fellow Republican lawyers – he has defended clients and made "dirty money" from dealers, human smugglers, etc.

And in the state senate race between Corpus Christi Republican Adam Hinojosa and Morgan LaMantia for Sucio's District 27 Texas Senate seat, they reveal their ill-concealed, anti-immigrant, white nationalist stripes, and paint her as an outsider who "is actually of Swedish and Italian heritage" who "used a fake Spanish accent" to run for "one of the few majority Hispanic senate seats" in Texas.

And in a blatantly hypocritical turn on words, Hinojosa, one of the major recipients of Republican campaign cash ($213,000 in the last 30 days), charges her family has spent millions to get her elected and "is still behind."

"Why is (she) pretending to be Hispanic and trying to buy 'our' senate seat," the ad asks plaintively?

Yet, Hinojosa's outside campaign handlers show their own ignorance in trying to make him out to be one of "us" when they say that the "best voting locations" in Brownsville are at the New Horizon Medical Center, the BISD Admin Building and Cameron Park Community Center, in that order.

If they had done their homework, they would know that in 11 days of the 2022 12-day early voting period, the most frequented polling places in Brownsville are the Main Public Library (10,538), the Southmost Public Library (1,836), and the Cameron Park Community Center (1,700). New Horizon comes in a distant fifth (1,082). 

So who are the real outsiders if not the Republican handlers from Austin and Washington with their carpetbags full of greenbacks and the too-willing malinche candidates and politicians they have lured to do their bidding in South Texas? 

The Republican money is being poured into our region to turn back progress and "conserve" their dominance in the state and country. Will we let them?