Conservative Republicans often tout how they favor decision-making made on the local level.

That may be true in some instances, but not in many others where their ideology and fears about the changing demographics of America trump the GOP’s supposed preference for local decision-making.

Take this example: The Senate voted this week to require actual fencing along 700 miles of border with Mexico instead of vehicle barriers and high-tech equipment. That well-known expert on border security and immigration - U.S. Sen Jim DeMint, R-S.C. - offered a plan that passed by a 54-44 vote, requiring the actual fencing.

DeMint is just your average Southern Republican politician who will take every opportunity  to make immigration and border security measures even more restrictive and punitive. A fence bill had already passed both houses of Congress and been signed into law by then-President George W. Bush, who was against border fencing before he was for it.

Much of the required 700 miles of border fencing has already been completed. The remaining stretches to be completed are mostly along our part of the border - with much of it in the Brownsville area. Our region has been the most vociferous in its opposition to the ill-advised fence, with several private landowners taking the federal government to court in alleging their rights as property owners have not been properly addressed.

Oh yes, the rights of private property owners, which is supposedly another bedrock belief of conservative Republicans - unless, of course, it means confisicating private property to build a border fence. In that case, GOP politicians like DeMint want even more fencing, no matter the cost or consequences.

Even with just a small portion of the border fence to go, DeMint wanted to make sure the remaining sections are all actual/physical fencing as opposed to high-tech equipment and vehicle barriers. The original bill called for a combination of both, but alas, time to revise that legislation so a politician like DeMint can go back home to South Carolina and tout his efforts to beef up border security.

So, a guy who has likely never been to the border area, or most certainly our part of the country, takes it upon himself to tell the Department of Homeland Security and its Border Patrol agency that it must build physical fencing even it they deem that high-tech monitoring and vehicle barriers would be just as effective.

DeMint contends that all-physical fencing is needed because of drug trafficking battles in Mexico. He offered no proof, of course, that more physical fencing would be more effective than vehicle barriers or equipment monitoring. Federal law enforcement experts have often said in the past that a combination of physical fencing, vehicle barriers, and high-tech monitoring work best as opposed to just fencing.

It’s not really about drug trafficking for DeMint and other Republicans like him. It’s really about immigration and keeping more of it from the south coming into the United States - legal or illegal. More physical fencing makes them feel better that something is being done to keep more Mexicans out of the United States.

There are actually reasonable Republicans on the immigration and border security issue. One Republican senator, George Voinovich, opposed DeMint’s measure, saying that the U.S Customs and Border Protection agency was the best judge of where actual fencing is needed along the border. You know how how Republicans in Congress are always saying it’s best “to listen to the commanders on the ground” in Iraq? Guess it doesn’t apply to the Border Patrol sector chiefs along the U.S.-Mexico border. In that case, it’s better for DeMint & Co., to listen to their own prejudices and biases as opposed to actual facts and knowledge.

Voinovich also pointed out that it can cost up to $5 million per mile  to build physical fencing.

If the federal law enforcement agencies which know border security best deem that vehicle barriers and high-tech monitoring are just as good and a whole lot cheaper, shouldn’t that be the way to go, Voinovich asked. No senator, we must stop all of the dishwashers, landscapers, housekeepers, and construction workers out of the country, and oppose any measures that would allow them to come in legally, depending on the needs of our industries.

Thank goodness for good ol’ boy Southern Republican senators like Jim DeMint and Jeff Sessions of Alabama. They’ve never been to the border, but they sure are experts when it comes to border security and immigration.

People are suckers for dog stories.

So the photo of a pup named Chief on the front page of The Brownsville Herald - and sitting in front of a fire truck no less - is irresitble on various levels. A dog that is beloved by local firefighters would seem to be a wholesome story. It is, but the doggie has been thrown into the mix of local politics where the thirst for battle is such that no opportunity to stick it to the other guy can be left unattended. 

Is nothing sacred, not even a dog? Uh, no.

Here’s how it goes: The president of the Brownsville Firefighters Association apparently really dislikes his boss, the fire chief, so the labor prez and other like-minded firefighters find a stray dog, take him to their station, and name him “Chief,” a dig no doubt at the human chief. The people’s chief ain’t taking it, so he takes chief the canine  to the animal shelter in between fighting fires and talking to Rotary Clubs about it being fire prevention month.

So this poor perrito, which once led a carefree life filled with the daily search for its three squares a day, is now the subject of a City Commission agenda item. The doggie discussion  became essential after the firefighter association prez, who’s the uncle of one of the city commissioners, filed a report against the human Chief, alleging theft, (i.e. the transporting of said chief, the dog, to the animal shelter, see the exhibit marked 1A).

When Chief, the canine, was reached for comment on the tussle brewing around it, the dog offered a terse no bark. No wonder. Chief, the canine, is now a mere pawn in a bitter dogfight between the firefighters and Chief, the human.

Another human, the city’s mayor, cares more for canines than some of the humans he works with, just like the firefighters. Chisme’s over-and-under on how long it would take for the mayor to get involved in doggie-gate was 8.5 hours. Wrong. There’s the speed-of-sound thing, and that’s fast, but not fast enough to gauge just how fast Brownsville’s current mayor will throw himself into the latest local controversy. H1N1 flu, approaching hurricanes, dogs, it’s all good. There’s always a camera waiting to record how passionate he is about Brownsville, how hard he works, how lousy his critics are, so forth and so on. Throw a dog into the mix, and olvidate,  this thing is taking off.

The mayor can’t just throw himself into a controversy. He has to do something extra, give it that 110 percent extra jab to stick it to his lousy critics, those miserables. Hey, I know mayor, why don’t you suggest that the fire chief should be fired for being so mean to el chiefie? 

Saying he is “just a public servant,” trying to represent the city he loves 24/7, the mayor proposed to evaluate and seek the ouster of the fire chief. No can do, says the city manager, who reminds the mayor that it’s his job to supervise the  fire chief. And basically, basically, the city manager said, the firefighters need to respect the rank, (fire chief), over a dog and the firefighters association set up to protect it.

And just to get a little more fire  power, the fire chief gets a lawyer, (of course), and hey, it’s the immediate former mayor of Brownsville, who as luck would have it, likes the current mayor the way Dick Cheney admires Barack Obama. It’s a “political vendetta” the former mayor/lawyer guy says about attempts to oust the fire chief over the dog custody battle. Ooh boy, wonders Chief the canine. Can’t the humans just all get along and get me a beef biscuit?

So to recap: The president of the firefighters association, who likes dogs better than his fire chief, files a theft complaint against said chief after beloved dog is taken from Station 6 to animal shelter. A dog’s best friend in Brownsville, i.e. the mayor, a mere public servant, says he’ll take the canine over the fire chief, to which the city manager tells the mayor to buzz off, to which the former mayor/lawyer guy for the fire chief calls it all a “political vendetta.”

Wow, good thing new city Commissioner Melissa Zamora is on this thing. We need to get this thing straightened out. Should fire stations have mascots? Should Chief the canine be one such mascot? Will Chief the canine even be willing to stay after all of this noisy mess or run away to his former life to seek the quiet of open spaces  and turned-over trash cans?

Zamora says the commission doesn’t have “a dog in this fight.” True. But it does have a chief, just not sure if it’s human or canine.

Jeez, at least Rick Perry just wanted his state to secede from the union.

When the Texas governor floated that suggestion during the recent tea party/anti-tax/Obama angst rallies, he was roundly panned by non-Republican types. Upon further review, however, Perry’s supposed blunder looks rather lame compared to what other prominent Republican politicians have done to themselves lately.

Just in recent weeks, a Nevada senator and a South Carolina governor, (both Republicans and would-be presidential candidates), admitted to adultery that went beyond the act itself. The lurid admissions of Sen. John Ensign and Gov. Mark Sanford  delved into the messy world of how it all intersected with politics, and if public funds were used in any way for their personal adventures.

In the case of both GOP politicans, their private failures became cable television talkathons, leading to rather spectacular crash-and-burn jobs, especially in the case of Sanford, who went missing for days before disclosing the rather unbelievable episode of traveling to Argentina to meet with his special friend. No sweeping judgements here, for as George W. Bush once said to a heckler while running for president in 2000: “We’re all sinners, buddy.”

Indeed, but for politicans there are different kinds of sins. For a GOP presidential candidate wanna-be, cheating on your spouse makes you toast. Forget about it. But if all you’ve done wrong is suggest that seceding from the United States of America may be a good idea while Barack Obama is president, hey, that’s gold among the more right-tilting Republican faithful.

Advocating the dissolution of the United States of America, even mildy, might sound a tad radical. It is, but you see, America isn’t really America right now with Barack Obama being the  president. Secessionist talk is cool, cheating on your spouse when you formerly played up family values, not so much.

Loopy liberals went nuts in their disdain for George W. when he was president. That’s true. But other than actor Alec Baldwin, or one of his brothers, (can’t recall exactly who), threatening to move to Europe if W was re-elected in 2004, I can’t recall a lefty endorsing the notion of dissolving the nation while a president from the other party was in office.

In his Texas drawl, which Perry plays up at GOP rallies, the governor said his state is a unique place, which could decide to leave the union if it so wishes under a supposed 1845 provision when Texas joined the United States. At a tea party rally in Austin, Perry expressed sympathy for those frustrated with the federal government on taxes, spending, and unfunded mandates. If the federal goverment doesn’t listen to those concerns, who knows what might happen, Perry said.

The governor was playing up to a certain mythology about Texas, but the truth is that when this state joined the union there was a provision that it could be divided into five seperate states. It is not empowered to leave the union, a question that historians say was settled by the Civil War. No matter, for 48 percent of Texas Republicans in a recent poll say their state is better off as an independent nation rather than being part of the United States. I kid you not, 48 percent of Texas Republicans want out of the red-white-and blue. Love it or leave it, buddy.

No wonder, then, that a new statewide poll shows Perry surging ahead of Kay Bailey Hutchison,  by double digits in the upcoming Texas GOP gubernatorial race. Hutchison, a current U.S. senator, is a solid conservative, but she’s not an advocate of going back to Civil War-era thinking, so thusly, she now trails Perry among Texas Republicans.

Just think, if Perry routs Kay Bailey and then rolls over whatever hapless candidate the Dems put up for governor, he could be a major player in the 2012 presidential election now that so many other national GOP figures are falling to the weaknesses of the flesh. If it weren’t for the fact that Perry is an intellectual lightweight and the last Texas governor who became president left office with an approval rating of 25 percent, Gov. Rick could have been a contender.

If he can stay away from Argentina, he might still be one. Like secession, who knows what might happen?

Being that we live in a 24-hour news cycle where people have short memories, here’s a quick question.

Remember the H1N1 flu, the so-called swine flu?

In May, the spread of this flu was all the rage. Many Rio Grande Valley school districts shut down classes for days, even weeks, in some cases justified with confirmed H1N1 cases among the student population. Hand soap during the flu scare became what plywood is to approaching hurricanes as the local populace hurried to boost germ-fighting efforts as a way to ward off H1N1.

The flu story has largely waned - even with two Valley-related deaths attributed to H1N1 - as we move into the heart of summer’s heat. Don’t be fooled, though, for history shows such viruses re-emerge months later, and often far worse than the first wave of illnesses. A recent Washington Post story detailed the four major flu pandemics of recent eras - 1889-92, 1918-1920, 1957-60, and 1968-70.

Each of these pandemics, like H1N1, began with initial sporadic outbreaks, and were followed months later by waves of widespread illnesses far worse than first outbreak. Even with just a moderate pandemic of a new flu virus like H1N1, the Centers for Disease Control estimates that the death toll in the U.S. would be 89,000 to 207,000.

“If the virulence of this virus (H1N1), does not significantly increase - and right now there is no reason to think it will - something closer to the lower number looks probable,” the Post article states.

If  H1N1 does claim about 90,000 American lives in the next two years or so, it’s impossible to say where most of those deaths will occur, or if they will be scattered versus being concentrated in one area. Still, since the Valley was one of the entry points for H1N1, (from a Mexico source), concern here should be more than moderately high.

The biggest key may be how fast medical experts can develop a reliable vaccine to a fast-mutating virus such as H1N1. The Post story reports that a good flu vaccine only reaches 70 percent effectiveness, a great one is 90 percent effective. What mark will the H1N1 vaccine hit - and how fast can it be made available? The flu is due to start making a comeback this winter. What sort of vaccine will have been developed by then, and will there be enough of it?

All impossible questions to answer for now, so good to stock up on hand sanitizers now and ask local entitities - most especially school districts - to ramp up educational and information efforts about H1N1 when a new school year begins in August.  Just this month, the World Health Organization officially declared H1N1 a global pandemic, reporting a jump in cases and fatalities.

The 24-hour news cycle relentlessly moves on the next story, but the H1N1 story will be back, if history is any guide.

- R.D. Cavazos

If President Barack Obama didn’t know where McAllen and the Rio Grande Valley were before, he does now, thanks to a recent article in The New Yorker magazine.

The article laid out in great detail how McAllen’s Medicare costs come out to $15,000 per year per enrollee - almost double the national average.  And yet, The New Yorker article reports, the rates of heart disease, cancer, HIV, asthma and infant mortality are lower  in McAllen  than the national average.

This obvious conflict between what is spent - on average - for medical care in McAllen vs. the rates of disease and injury got the attention of the president of the United States to such an extent that he made the article required reading in the White House. Members of Congress who have visited with Obama as discussions continue over health care reform say he brings the article to their attention as an example of why such reform is urgently needed.

“He (Obama) took that article and put it in front of a big group of senators and said, `This is what we’ve got to fix,’ ” said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon in a New York Times story.

The magazine article was hardly written by a novice unfamiliar with the world of medicine. The story’s author is Dr. Atul Gawande, a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School. An online reviewer of the magazine article called Dr. Gawande “one of the brightest and most articulate authorities on health care issues in this country.”  

Gawande compared medical costs between McAllen and El Paso, (border cities with similar demographics), and found McAllen patients got “twenty percent more abdominal ultrasounds, thirty percent more bone-denisty studies, sixty percent more stress tests,” and over 500 percent more urine-flow tests to diagnose prostrate troubles.

And there’s more. McAllen patients, Gawande reported, got more gall bladder operations, knee replacements, breast biopsies, heart bypass surgeries, and more home nurse visits. For all of the extra medical procedures, the Harvard doctor wrote, there is no evidence that all of this care has produced better results.

The New Yorker article stung and angered the McAllen medical community. One local doctor, Linda Villarreal, an Edinburg internist, said the magazine article failed to address the high percentage of indigent costs in this area - and the ever-present fears of local physicians about malpractice lawsuits.

Villarreal made those comments to The Monitor newspaper, and she has a point when it comes to litigation fears given this area’s well-deserved, (unfortunately), reputation for being one of the more lawsuit-heavy regions of the country. Any local TV viewing is sure to include advertisements from 20-something lawyers freshly minted out of law school, and stuffed in their new three piece-suits as they exhort viewers to call them to get the cash they deserve.

It’s true the high number of indigent cases here, along with litigation fears, are sure to push medical costs up in this region as physicians order extra tests to protect themselves against lawsuits. It’s also true that in McAllen a number of physicians own medical facilities, hospitals, and test facilities, and one spin on Gawande’s findings is that extra tests are ordered to increase payments to these facilities.

Gawande appears to be a critic of profit-driven medical care in contending that it leads to quantity of care, (i.e. all of the tests and unnecessary surgeries), over quality of care. That’s for the professionals and experts to hash out, but ultimately, regular folks are the one affected.

In any case, it’s interesting to note that as the health care reform debate rages in this country that a community close to home - McAllen, Tx. - has found itself in the midst of this national discussion.

Growing up on a citrus farm with chickens to boot, the ratio of flies to human beings in my family’s general living area was quite high.

We hated bugs in general, with flies and mosquitos at the top of the list. It’s hard to say which is worse, but my mother especially despied flies. She nearly always had matamoscas  at  the ready, especially on those long and hot summer days.

When my Mom wasn’t using a fly swatter on the critters, she was whacking one across the back of my legs or those of my younger brothers when we crossed her. I wonder what my mother would have said way back when if I had said, “Hey Mom, don’t kill that mosca. Let me get a Katcha Bug Humane Bug Catcher so we can save its life and we can release the mosca into the wild so it can live another 10 days before it dies.” 

The humane bug catcher is a contraception that the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is sending over to the White House because President Obama murdered a fly during a television interview this week.

“We believe that people, where they can be compassionate, should be, for all animals,” PETA spokesman Bruce Freidrich told Politico.

A fly is an animal? Nombre. I wouldn’t have wanted to tell my grandfather the gritty farmer that one. He didn’t much care for his grandchildren’s dogs that lived next door to him, much less the hordes of flies buzzing around his farm. He barely tolerated the chickens, but then he had to, given they produced something, (eggs), that my grandparents ate with everything from green beans to ground  beef to nopalitos, their personal favorite juevos combo.

Taking a wild guess here, but I suspect most Americans aren’t reaching for a bug humane catcher with flies buzzing around. Each fly carries about 5 million germs, including those that spread delightful diseases such as typhoid, cholera, dystentery, polio and pneumonia. Taking a fly swatter to the task over trapping flies in a bug humane catcher would surely be one of few bipartisan issues that Obama and the Republicans can agree upon.

 Organizations like PETA are out to save the world, so bless them, but I can’t go with the flies-are-animals things. On the very same day that the president of the United States executed a fly, I was at a local sandwich place when a fly came buzzing around, landing on a window next to me. Without thinking, I rolled up  the Life Section of my USA Today and swatted it dead.

Oh well, at least it was the soft news of entertainment that ended the 15-day life of the average fly and not the hard news of an uncaring world.  

Barack Obama’s resounding victory in the 2008 presidential election reached every corner of this nation - and perhaps most striking in Indiana, a state that had not gone for a Democrat since 1964.

That was the year Lyndon B. Johnson carried the state in his landslide win over Republican Barry Goldwater. The notion that Obama - a candidate all the television talking heads said would have trouble gaining the support of working-class white voters - could carry deep Republican red Indiana would have seemed outlandish  in early 2008.

Obama would indeed carry Indiana,  just barely, by a slim 26,000-vote margin, and one prominent Republican operative knows why. Mike Murphy, a former key adviser to John McCain, writes in the current Time magazine article that “it was a huge shock to the GOP when Barack Obama won Republican Indiana last year.”

Even more shocking, Murphy said, is how Obama did it. Latino voters in Indiana,  he wrote, delivered the state for Obama. Exit polls showed that the 58,000-vote margin among Hispanic voters in Indiana gave the Democrat the edge he needed to defeat McCain, the Republican candidate.

“That’s right, GOP,”  Murphy writes, “you’ve entered a brave new world ruled by Latino Hoosiers, and you’re losing.”

Murphy’s magazine piece goes on to say what many in his party believe these days. Unless the Republican Party begins to pick up support among Hispanics in the U.S, it stands little chance of winning national elections again. By 2030, the changing demographics of America are such that Murphy says Latinos will make up about 20 percent of the national vote.

Murphy calls Texas “the crucial buckle for the GOP’s Electoral College belt,” and this state will become majority Hispanic in the coming decades, putting the GOP’s political hold here in doubt if current trends continue.

Given these basic facts, it will be interesting to see how this state’s two Republican senators vote on the Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor. Prediction: John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison will both vote no on Sotomayor given their fear of alienating the GOP base, which in staunchily against her nomination.

And so, the overwhelming number of Republican senators that are likely to vote against the well-qualified Sotomayor will further move the party toward what Murphy calls the “GOP ice age.”

That’s too bad. Until the GOP calls off what Murphy calls “the Republican congressional jihad on immigration,” it’s likely to get little if anywhere with Latinos in the U.S.

In a changing world where Latino Hoosiers are deciding elections, Republicans will keep losing elections until the party thaws out.

When I think of a good, basic American last name, Krikorian comes to mind.

I didn’t know how to pronounce Krikorian. My first stab at it went something like “Creek-or-e-an.” Man, was I off. It’s actually pronounced “kri-KOR-ee-uhn.” But don’t get any ideas that I have to pronounce it right.

I don’t. This is America, so I can say other people’s names wrong and I don’t have to feel bad about it. Furthermore, no one can make me say Krikorian with the right pronunciation. To compel me to do so would diminish my assimilation into American life, which in this case would mean giving in to all the Armenians who expect us to say their names the correct way.

I’m hip to that since I’ve become so accustomed to America at large saying Latino last names incorrectly. As a kid, I was a huge major league baseball fan, and found it odd that national sports broadcasters couldn’t say simple names like Perez or Cantu right. Then I went to college far from the South Texas motherland, and professors and fellow students in a foreign place like Denton, Tx., would look at my last name, Cavazos, and not want to even venture a guess on how to say it.

I took no great offense, nor did I insist people in Denton, Tx., say my last name correctly, which means I’m Mark Krikorian’s kind of guy. Krikorian runs one of those immigration restrictionist organizations based in D.C., the ones that blame immigrants for everything from voter fraud to global warming to parents naming their kids Willow and Piper.

Krikorian ventured out from his anti-immigrant encampment recently to say no one could make him pronounce Sonia Sotomayor’s last name correctly. To say the last name of President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee correctly - with its Spanish emphasis on the last syllable - is an “unnatural pronounciation” in English, Krikorian said.

Thusly, for anyone to insist upon the “unnatural pronouncation” of such a strange and apparently non-American last name “is something we shouldn’t be giving in to,” said Krikorian, whose own last name originates deep from the heart of what was once the Soviet Union.

“There ought to be limits,” Krikorian said in deferring to people’s own pronounciation of their names. So, if Brittney with two t’s wants to say her name differently from Britney with just one plain `t,’ why she’s out of luck. We’ll just say Brittney or Britney any dang way we please.

The pronounciation of names is part of the American assimilation process, Krikorian informed us, so people who insist we say their last names right, with all of the emphasis on the right syllables, etc., are basically refusing to be assimilated.

So, Judge Soto-may-er, sorry, you’re headed for the highest court in the land, but no way, no how are we saying your last name correctly, or else we would be giving in to the multicultural police. Better to go with the flow of assimilation, just like Mark Creek-or-e-an advises.

Next thing you know we’re pronouncing Armenian names correctly, and we don’t want to do that. It’ll just encourage more immigration.

The march to complete the final stages of the border fence got a boost from up high on Monday.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a case that challenged the federal government’s authority to supersede state and local laws blocking the fence’s construction - what little of it remains to be built. The case, with its origins in El Paso, challenged the constitutionality of a provision in a sweeping 2005 law that gave the Department of Homeland Security the power to waive local legal requirements in building the  700-mile border fence.

The 2005 law gives the DHS secretary extraordinary power to also circumvent federal laws - such as the Endangered Species Act - in constructing the fence.  The El Paso case appears to gotten considerable interest from the Supreme Court justices as the matter was brought up eight times in their conference, which according to The Hill, is unusual. However, in the end, the justices declined to hear the case, which upholds the 2005 law.

From here, all locals have left in their limited legal arsenel is U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen of Brownsville. In current court proceedings, Hanen is pressing the DHS to answer some basic questions as it hurries to complete its fence by year’s end. Hanen wants to know how the federal government will ensure landowners access to their property when the fence goes up.

Thousands of acres of land will be stranded between the fence and the river when all construction of the structure is completed. The layout of the ill-begotten fence is essentially a straight one. The reality, however, is that the Rio Grande winds every which way and not in the straight line a government planner would prefer.

How will landowners access this no-man’s land between the fence and the river and how will landowners be compensated - if need be - for these stretches of property? That’s what Judge Hanen wants to know.  The right of landowners to protect their property and receive proper compensation for its sales - most essential American principles - are apparently no match for the 2005 law giving the DHS secretary unprecedented powers.

Ultimately, DHS will gets its way. The Supreme Court’s decision this week was essentially the final and definitive blow in assuring red state America that a border fence will be going up. It will be to our deteriment along the border, but it will make red staters feel better that something is being done to deter the journey of  the dishwashers, construction workers, landscapers and sheet rockers whose labor is diminishing America.

Making her way down the hallways and corridors of power, Sonia Sotomayor is quite a sight, a very much Latina-looking woman walking her way toward the U.S. Supreme Court.

Sotomayor, a federal judge with 17 years of experience on the bench, is President Barack’s Obama’s first nominee to the Supreme Court. He will likely have more such appointments, but Obama may never make a high court pick like this one – selecting a judge loaded with judicial experience and the all star academic credentials of an Ivy League education.

And oh yea, she’s very puertorriquena.

The last part of the Sotomayor profile is hard for the political right of this country to put its collective mind around and comprehend. They can’t knock her credentials. Sotomayor was appointed to a federal district judgeship in the early 1990s by the first President Bush, a Republican, and then elevated to her present post as a federal appeals court judge by President Clinton, a Democrat, seven years later.

In both cases, she received the overwhelming support of the U.S. Senate in confirming her to the judicial posts. Over 25 Republican senators voted for her most recent confirmation, including then-Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who most political pundits would rank as one of the more conservative GOP legislators of recent times.

And yet, these days, as Supreme Court justice nominee Sotomayor makes the rounds on Capitol Hill, visiting key senators of both parties before her confirmation hearings next month, a good many GOP politicians are making like they’ve never seen the judge before. 

When the second President Bush picked John Roberts and Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court, Republicans in the Senate couldn’t get to confirmation hearings fast enough. Now, with a Democrat in the White House, the very same GOP senators who wanted a rush job in getting confirmation votes on Roberts and Alito want to slow walk the Sotomayor nomination.

Why, they clamor, there are hundreds-and-hundreds of Sotomayor opinions to read and examine, and apparently all 3,000-plus of them must be read before a single question can be asked of Obama’s first high court nominee. OK, we get the delaying tactics, but mostly what the Republican senators will find in the Sotomayor legal record are rather dry, technical and methodical rulings that more often than not demonstrate the sort of judicial restraint that conservatives are always saying they want.

It all boils down to two things. One, the Republicans want to make Obama pay for voting against Roberts and Alito during his days as a senator. Obama spoke especially highly of Roberts, who is today the Supreme Court’s chief justice, but then voted against his confirmation anyway as part of a political calculation as he prepared to run for president.

That really bugs Republican senators, and I guess you can’t blame them because Obama should have voted for Robert’s confirmation. The chief justice has impeccable credentials, just like Sotomayor.

But, really, here’s the thing. There are two sides to Sotomayor. One is the esteemed judge with her Princeton and Yale educational training and the years of solid work on the bench as a federal judge. Some have knocked her judicial record as being unspectacular, rather mundane, but the prevailing judgment seems to be one of a highly competent, thorough, hard-working jurist who respects precedent and legal order.

Sotomayor, according to conservative-leaning columnist David Brooks of the New York Times, has “chosen to submit herself to the discipline of the law.’’

What annoys many conservatives is that Sotomayor is fiercely proud of her ethnic heritage. She appears to especially enjoy mentoring young Hispanic professionals in the law, speaking to college students, offering inspiration that if she can do it so can they.

Sotomayor does not lack for confidence, even having the audacity to make public comments that she believes her life as a Latina woman who has raised herself from the housing projects of Brooklyn to the Ivy League, and then to the lofty realm of federal judgeships, all makes her every bit as smart and able as white men. Why, the thought anyone could make such comments, it must be racist, the right-wing talking heads bellow.

Background noise it would all appear for the legal record is the main event, not some scattered speeches over the years in which Sotomayor has spoken honestly about how her ethnic experience fits into the America she grew up in.

Republican senators and their staff can read all of Sotomayor’s opinions and her speeches going back to kindergarten. They will find nothing of any significance to disqualify her from the high court.

Being puertarriquena is part of who Sotomayor is, but it’s not all she is about, a distinction most Republican senators will fail to grasp, which will lead nearly all of them to vote against her. Many of these GOP senators were for Sotomayor, (past confirmation votes), before they will be against her, flip-floppers of the first order.

Sotomayor has earned the honor Obama granted her. She played by the rules, graduated from some of this nation’s best schools with the highest of honors, and has served with honor and distinction for nearly two decades as a federal judge.

She is as fully deserving of her standing as someone named John Roberts, a most classic blend of old American names that will soon have a Sotomayor sitting by him on the U.S. Supreme Court.

- R.D. Cavazos