Republican opposition to liberalized immigration reform has put at risk the loyalty of a key constituency - evangelical Protestant Hispanics. The loss of this Hispanic support endangers the GOP's ability to win presidential elections.

In the view of Republican strategists, it is crucial for the party's candidates to win a substantial share of the Hispanic vote to remain competitive in the Southwest mountain states - Colorado, Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico - and, looking farther ahead, in Florida and Texas.

Key leaders in the rapidly growing Latino evangelical community who had provided strong support to President Bush in 2004 are deeply angered by the opposition among Republicans to immigration legislation now stalled in the Senate.

"The Republican Party does not have a clue just how the perception of them among Hispanics has completely deteriorated in the last few years," said Marcos Witt, Senior Pastor of the Hispanic congregation at Lakewood Church in Houston and a three-time Latin Grammy winner for his Christian recordings.

Witt, a social conservative who actively supported Bush's re-election campaign, said in an interview with Huffington Post that Latino resentment is so strong in Texas that "our Senators [Republicans John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison] can kiss the Hispanic vote goodbye."

Similar levels of discontent with the GOP are expected at the three-day National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast and Conference organized by Reverend Luis Cortes, Jr., a 2004 Bush supporter. The conference begins Wednesday in Washington.

Bush made substantial gains among Hispanics between 2000 and 2004, going from 35 percent of the Hispanic vote to more than 40 percent. Bush's pick-up was concentrated among the rapidly increasing Protestant Latinos who tend to be far more conservative on abortion and gay marriage than Catholic Hispanics. Among evangelical Hispanics, Bush's margin shot up from 44 percent in 2000 to 56 percent in 2004, while support among Catholic Hispanics remained unchanged at 33 percent, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

In 2006, support for Republican House candidates nose-dived among both Protestant and Catholic Latinos, to just 30 percent for the two groups combined, according to exit polls. Shortly before the election, the then-Republican-controlled House passed a controversial immigration bill opposed by most Latino groups - a bill that, if enacted, would have imposed new sanctions on employers who hire illegal immigrants and would have added tough law enforcement measures at the border without providing a path to citizenship for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the country.

Rev. Cortes, president and CEO of Philadelphia-based Esperanza USA, the largest Hispanic faith-based community-development corporation in the country, is now outspoken in his criticism of the GOP.

"Evangelical Hispanic voters have to lay the brunt of the blame on the members of the Republican Party" for the Senate's failure to provide a path to legal status for illegal immigrants, Cortes told Huffington Post. A conservative on abortion and gay marriage, Cortes said that those issues are now trumped by his concern with family preservation and reunification provisions, which are threatened by new immigration measures proposed by the GOP.

"Family is our number one value, after loving God. Our family comes first. We must elect people who are for our families and for immigration reform. That is how we would begin to organize our people for every House and Senate election," Cortes said.

Senate Majority leader Harry Reid withdrew the immigration legislation from the Senate floor after he failed in a bid to force a vote on the bill by shutting down debate. The Reid cloture motion failed 45-50, with Democrats and independents voting in favor by 38-12, and Republicans opposed by 38 to 7. In plain English, Democrats (voting for cloture) were overwhelmingly for a more liberal bill favored by many Hispanics, while Republicans (voting against) were overwhelmingly opposed.

Florida Senator Mel Martinez, who is also chairman of the Republican National Committee. Martinez warned, "I believe that not to play this card right would be the destruction of our party."

The immigration debate has served over the past three years to produce an irreconcilable split between the congressional and presidential wings of the Republican Party. Bush and his strategists share Martinez' view that Hispanic support is crucial to winning national elections. In Congress, especially in the House, however, the political motivation of many Republican members is strikingly different. Most GOP House members have very safe, and often very conservative, districts. They face little danger of a serious Democratic challenge in the general election. Instead, the major threat to re-election is a primary challenge from the right. A vote in support of liberal immigration reform would only serve to encourage such challenges, a threat most Republican incumbents seek assiduously to avoid.

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