Miami GOP lawmakers demand democracy in Cuba, Venezuela, embrace Trump
As races for the Nov. 8 midterm elections heat up, Florida’s CubanAmerican Republican legislators running for re-election are trying to portray themselves as champions of democracy. They are not.
If anything, they are masters of political hypocrisy.
U.S. Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar is running for re-election against state Sen. Annette Taddeo in Miami’s Congressional District 27, one of the nation’s most contested House races. Most pollsters say the Republican Party is likely to retake the House, and perhaps the Senate, in the November elections.
Salazar’s television and radio ads focus on her allegedly indefatigable struggle for freedom in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. The House Republican website describes her as “committed to acting tirelessly in defense of individual rights and liberties” and “well-known for her advocacy for human rights and democracy around the world, especially for the people of Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua.”
But, like her fellow Florida Cuban-American Republican colleagues in Congress, when it comes to defending democracy in the United States, her own country, Salazar is notoriously silent.
Like fellow House members Carlos Giménez and Mario Diaz-Balart, she changes the subject when asked where she stands on former President Trump’s support for the bloody takeover of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 or about Trump’s false claims that the 2020 elections were fraudulent.
If you believe in democratic institutions, there should be no question about the 2020 election results. The U.S. Electoral College, the conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court, more than 60 lower courts, Trump’s former Vice President Mike Pence, Trump’s former Attorney General Bill Barr and other top officials concluded that President Biden had won the elections. Case closed.
And yet, Miami’s Cuban-American House members have supported Trump’s lies. Diaz Balart and Gimenez voted against certifying the 2020 election results in Pennsylvania and Arizona. Salazar missed the vote because she was at home with COVID-19, but shortly thereafter repeated Trump’s lies about the Pennsylvania state results in a Jan. 11 interview with Radio Mambi.
At a time when Trump looms as one of the most likely Republican hopefuls for the 2024 elections and his refusal to accept electoral losses poses a serious risk to America’s democracy, these lawmakers act as if there were good autocrats and bad ones. They lash out against the dictators of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, but refuse to criticize their party’s own aspiring autocrat.
There is a similar hypocrisy in congressional Republicans’ claims that Biden is a socialist, and in their stands on immigration, Medicare and Social Security, which are key issues for their Hispanic constituents.
Republican lawmakers have historically stood for supporting those fleeing from communist regimes. But you didn’t hear Republican legislators complain much when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently used Florida taxpayers money to fly Venezuelan migrants under false pretexts from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, to score political points with his anti-immigrant base.
Likewise, Salazar and Gimenez joined 87% of Republicans in Congress in voting against Biden’s massive $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, which many of them denounced as “socialist.” The law is the largest investment in more than a generation in the nation’s roads, bridges, ports, clean energy and other much-needed infrastructure projects.
But shortly after the it passed, the Miami lawmakers sent letters to Biden begging for funds from it for their districts. “I didn’t know there were that many socialist Republicans!” Biden quipped on Oct. 7, given they had voted against the law.
Granted, when it comes to double standards, the Democratic Party has its share of hypocrites in Congress, too. They criticize Trump’s coup attempt, but remain largely silent about Cuba’s dictatorship. Last year, for instance, far-left U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of New York, and Minnesota U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar voted against a House resolution supporting pro-democracy demonstrators on the island.
I fully support Salazar, Gimenez and Diaz-Balart’s denunciations of the dictatorships in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua , as much as I applaud Democratic lawmakers such as Sen. Bob Menendez for condemning those regimes.
But you can’t demand democracy abroad and condone autocracy at home, which is exactly what Florida’s Cuban-American Republican legislators are doing.