Rick Santorum, no stranger to alienating every conceivable minority group, today told residents of Puerto Rico that he would support statehood for the U.S. territory if they first followed U.S. law and made English their official language. Puerto Rico is home to 3.7 million people, 95% of whom speak Spanish at home. And it offers up to 23 delegates to the winner of the GOP primary on Sunday, even though its citizens are not allowed to vote in presidential elections. Only problem is there is no such law.
Jason Linkins at the Huffington Post has an excellent explanation as to why Santorum so willy-nilly would think it’s OK to offend 3.7 million Puerto Ricans: “Rick Santorum tends to favor not wavering on his policy principles over winning popularity contests,” along with the fact that, as Linkins notes, Mitt Romney already has “more or less wrapped up the Puerto Rico primary,”  so Santorum has little to lose.
Linkins quotes Reuters, which reports, “Santorum said he did not support a state in which English was not the primary language.”
“Like any other state, there has to be compliance with this and any other federal law,” Santorum said. “And that is that English has to be the principal language. There are other states with more than one language such as Hawaii but to be a state of the United States, English has to be the principal language.”
Here are a few more excerpts from Linkins’ HuffPo piece:
But as Reuters goes on to point out, “the U.S. Constitution does not designate an official language” and there is no extant legal “requirement that a territory adopt English as its primary language in order to become a state,” so it’s hard to say what “compliance” issue exists, other than Rick Santorum just really, really wanting them to speak English.
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Santorum just believes that everyone should be in “compliance” with an English language standard, regardless of the fact that no such compliance requirement or enforcement mechanism exists. And he won’t pander to satisfy the idiosyncratic attitudes of local constituencies. Romney doesn’t have that problem. He’ll pander up a storm! And so he’ll win Puerto Rico’s delegates.