LVDP is in for LG

For anyone who needs an introduction, here's Wayne Slater.

San Antonio Sen. Leticia Van de Putte will serve notice this week that she is running for lieutenant governor as a Democrat, according to a person close the decision. As such, Van de Putte is expected to join Sen. Wendy Davis atop a Democratic ticket that will showcase two women vying to be their party’s highest-ranking statewide officeholders. Van de Putte is a pharmacist who served in the Texas House and has been in the Texas Senate since 1999. In 2002 she became the chair of the Senate Hispanic Caucus and has become nationally recognized as a Hispanic leader.

Davis catapulted to national attention with an 11-hour filibuster against an abortion-restriction bill in June. As Republican lawmakers suspended Davis’ filibuster, Van de Putte challenged the decision of the GOP to bend Senate rules in order to end the marathon talkathon. When the Republican lieutenant governor failed to recognize Van de Putte to speak from the floor of the Senate, she said: “At what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over her male colleagues?” The question brought abortion-rights supporters that filled the Senate gallery to their feet, effectively ending Senate business as the special legislative session came to a close.

Strategists say the addition of Van de Putte, a Latina with substantial political experience, could help mobilize Hispanic voters the Democratic Party needs if it hopes to break two decades of GOP political dominance in the state.

A Latina pharmacist with political wisdom. That's as good as it gets for the issues around which the 2014 statewide elections will turn.

Now if Democrats can convince someone like Rodney Ellis or Royce West (no offense intended to Maxey Scherr or Michael Fjetland, who announced yesterday) to run against John Corndog, they've got a real shot at toppling the Republican dominance in this state.

"When Texas is purple, there will be no more Republican presidents"

That's Roger Simon -- not a liberal -- quoting an unnamed "immigration expert".  Everybody understands this premise; even Republicans.  A dominant vocal minority in that party, however, just don't seem to care.

Government shutdowns and Obamacare fits are a walk in the park compared to the damage they are doing to themselves.

Comprehensive immigration reform is the turning point for the Republican Party as we know it today -- actually about five or six years ago, B. P. (Before Palin).  Either they will split themselves in half -- Whigs and Nativists, let's call them -- or some sense will seep into the skulls of the rebels.  Don't count on the latter.

Read all of Simon, but the best is last.

The expert also said that if comprehensive immigration reform is dead in this Congress — and it looks like it could very well be — it could pass in an election year or even by a lame-duck Congress. Obama has said he will sign any bill that includes a path to citizenship for the 11 million.

This could be his (second-term) legacy and, ironically, the only hope the Republicans have to be more than a whites-only party, rowing against a demographic tide.

“If the Republicans decided to pass it,” Obama said Friday of immigration reform, “it would be to their political advantage to do it.”

The Republicans in the House could continue to hold out and hope for a Republican White House in 2016. But every election they delay immigration reform puts the White House further from their grasp.

Oh yeah, for a while longer the rural parts of Texas will keep the state hard red longer than almost anywhere else, along with a few other stubborn Southern pockets. The battle for the soul of the GOP was lost long ago (I'm pretty sure it died sometime during Ronald Reagan's era), but the two warring factions will keep fighting over the carcass a while longer. Whoever emerges victorious hasn't actually won much; half of a once-major party.  The other half limps away madder than hell.

Rest in pieces, I say.