Diverse Hispanics in Biden’s Cabinet

The idea of ethnic equity in a president’s cabinet has long been a goal of progressive democrats who largely see minorities as representing monolithic backgrounds and liberal positions. So it is interesting to note that the four Hispanics President Biden has nominated to serve in his cabinet – 16% – are very diverse themselves.

•  Miguel Cardona, Secretary of Education, was raised in Connecticut by parents of Puerto Rican descent.  He earned a BA degree in bilingual education from Connecticut State University and a doctorate at University of Conn., was a teacher, principal and Connecticut’s State Superintendent of Education in 2019.

•  Alejandro Mayorkas, the first immigrant and Latino to head the Department of Homeland Security, was born in Cuba and raised in Los Angeles of parents of Jewish Cuban and Latvian descent. He graduated from the University of California Berkeley and Loyola Law School. In 2009 he was Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and became President Obama’s Deputy Director of DHLS.

•  Isabella Casillas Guzman the Secretary of the Small Business Administration was born in California but her family is four generations of Texans who originally fled the Mexican Revolution. She is of Jewish, German and Chinese descent as well. She earned a BS degree at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and worked for the ProAmerica bank and the SBA.

•  Xavier Becerra, nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, was born and raised in California of Mexican descent. He was the first in his family to go to college graduating from Stanford University and Stanford Law School. He was served as a state assemblyman, a prominent Congressman – including as Chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and in 2017 California’s Attorney General (replacing Kamala Harris). Becerra’s confirmation has met with objections that he has no experience in medical and health administration.

The Four Most Powerful Hispanics in Congress:  Blue Dogs

Despite the Democrats winning the Presidency, House and Senate in the 2020 election, their margin for control is extremely narrow. The 50-50 split in the Senate gave Dems the majority only because the Vice President – a Democrat -  can break a tie. In the House the margin is only four. Democrats won back only 222 seats, just four over the 218 necessary for a majority vote.  There are plenty of potential Democratic defectors in both Chambers -- fiscally conservative Democrats who oppose raising the national debt. They are called Blue Dogs.

There are two Blue Dogs in the Senate: Joe Manchin (WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ). There are 18 in the House. Four are Hispanic and could be called the most powerful Latinos in Congress: Lou Correa (CA), Jim Costa (CA), Henry Cuellar (TX) and Vicente Gonzalez (TX). Cuellar is an outspoken critic of liberal immigration policies. In the past, Blue Dogs were always thought to be Dixiecrats. But in January 2019, McClatchy news service reported that the Blue Dogs had changed from a coalition of “southern white men” to “a multi-regional, multicultural group”; only five came from Southern states.  The almost $2 trillion dollar COVID relief bill that passed along strict party lines may well have maxed out the tolerance of Blue Dogs for any more debt. With COVID herd immunity predicted for this summer, Blue Dogs in both chambers can and probably will turn off much of the Democrat’s federal spigot.

Ed Priorities For 2021

President Biden made it clear in his transition that his top priority was to reopen the schools.  But that is hard for any president to do. The United States is not a centralized country with power from the top pelting down to every state and county.  It is a federal republic and the President is in charge of only one of the three branches of government: the executive branch. He manages the federal government’s agencies by selecting their Secretaries and budgets the appropriations allocated to them by Congress.

Education in addition, has another limit. It is not included in the constitution as a jurisdiction of Congress; it is still irrevocably a state’s matter. Public school openings, as has been seen in the past few months, also are decided by districts and local teachers’ unions. The President can do little else but urge schools to open and push Congress to allocate funds to do so. Biden did that well on March 10. The COVID relief bill included $123 billion for education, for use up to 2028; that’s on top of the largely unspent $54 billion allocated in December of 2019 and $13 billion allocated to schools in the spring of 2020.

But other educational priorities can be initiated through Presidential executive orders to his Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona.  It appears that among the top issues is to restrict government support for for-profit post-secondary schools. That might not be so popular among many Hispanics of all ages who earn professional certificates at for profit colleges to qualify for a wide range of jobs, especially in the medical field. On March 8, Cardona issued a letter to parents outlining his educational priorities. They include “closing opportunity gaps and disparities in high school graduation rates and making higher education easier to access…especially for learners of color, those from low-income families, and those, as I was, who would be the first in their families to attend.”