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US Senate: Al franken
For those of us who support comprehensive immigration reform, the most important election in Minnesota this year is probably the election for US Senate. There once was a time when Senator Norm Coleman aggressively courted Latino voters. He won his second term as mayor of St Paul with substantial support from Latinos from the West Side of St Paul. After his election to the US Senate, he formed a Hispanic Advisory committee. He regularly consulted members of the Latino community on important issues and asked our opinion on immigration issues. He told members of the Latino community several times that he would support comprehensive immigration reform.
Senator Coleman then shocked many of us in the Latino community. When faced in the Senate with the most important vote on comprehensive immigration reform last year, Norm Coleman failed to deliver. The President of the United States supported the bill. Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama supported the bill. John McCain co-sponsored the bill. The leadership of both parties in the Senate supported the bill. But when the Senate needed 60 votes to make sure that they could end debate and then move to a vote on the proposed reform, Norm Coleman voted against, effectively killing immigration reform until after the 2008 election.
We invited Senator Coleman last Thursday to join his opponents Al Franken and Dean Barkley in interviews in La Invasora 1400 AM. He was the only one of the three candidates who didn’t respond. Coleman was also the only candidate of the three that ignored questionnaires for La Prensa endorsements.
The editorial committee of La Prensa decided this year that it would not support candidates that didn’t support comprehensive immigration reform. That’s the main reason Norm Coleman won’t get our endorsement this year, an endorsement he could have won two years ago. We also feel Coleman, contrary to his claims of independence, has voted too often with the failed policies of the Bush administration.
The US Senate race this year has only two candidates that we could support. Both Senator Dean Barkley and Al Franken are attractive candidates. Dean Barkley convinced Jesse Ventura to run for governor as an independent in 1998, and was largely responsible for Ventura’s surprise victory that year. When Paul Wellstone tragically died in a plane crash a few weeks before the
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