With regard to (Florida Republican) Sen. Mel Martinez's
decision to step down from the U.S. Senate,
this article by NDN President Simon Rosenberg is definitely worth reading.
Earlier this year Senator Martinez, clearly now an outlier in his own Party, announced that he would not seek re-election for a 2nd term. And today, just one day after a Supreme Court vote where he witnessed first hand the reactionary attitudes toward race and Hispanics of his own Senate conference, Mel Martinez choose to not just not run for re-election but leave the Senate and his Republican colleagues altogether.
I've gotten a lot of questions this week about whether the way the Senate Republicans handled the Sotomayor vote would contribute to the deep alientation Hispanics feel towards the GOP. I offered some initial thoughts in a post which made it to the front page of the Huffington Post for almost a day. But perhaps they should ask the only minority in the Republican Senate conference, who, today, announced that he was doing what millions of Hispanics had already chosen to do these last few years - flee the national Republican Party.
Senator Martinez's resignation is yet another victory of those Republicans working to repudiate the sensible Bush/Rove strategy towards race and immigration, and yet another clear indicator of how unattractive the modern GOP's reactionary attitude towards race has become even to members of their own party.
Eventually, the Republican Senate caucus is going to be all white males. With Mel Martinez's resignation, they're getting close!
