Texas gains a man of honor in Congress as Ciro Rodrigez returns to the fold.
In the meantime, another dark chapter in Texas’ legislative history is over.
Henry Bonilla is not going back to Congress and we all should be grateful.
Why? Well, just take a look at how Henry saw the runoff election prior to the voting in the border-heavy 23rd Congressional District.

“We look at this as the first election of the next cycle,” Bonilla told the Associated Press. “To set the tone for what we can do the next time out in 2008.”

Now, we know.
The GOP’s only Hispanic member of the U.S. House of Representatives loses big time in an Hispanic district.
Ciro Rodriguez garnered roughly 54% of the vote. It wasn’t even close. In Maverick County, neighbors of Bonilla’s border fence turned on his dramatically. In a county that Bonilla easily had carried even though it voted for John Kerry, Rodriguez garnered 86% of the vote (90% of the early voting).
Bonilla sat back and joined the chorus as the Rove Nazis marched lockstep in time to the anti-immigration march. Bonilla said nothing as Hispanics were targeted, demonized and led off to the camps.
Henry, actually, was in charge of the store for attracting new minority candidates for the GOP. Remember the “American Dream PAC”? Wikpedia does:

When Bonilla took charge in 1999 of an independent political fund called American Dream PAC, he made clear that its mission was to “give significant, direct financial assistance to first-rate minority GOP candidates”. However, between 1999 and the end of 2003, only $48,750 (or 8.9 percent) of the $547,000 the PAC has received, has gone to minority office-seekers, while more than $100,000 has been routed to Republican Party organizations or causes. Bonilla defends his PAC’s record of assisting minority candidates, saying, “We did the best we could.” In all, 27 minority office-seekers, predominantly Hispanic-American, received money, mostly small donations. But Bonilla said it was sometimes difficult to find “good, solid minority candidates to expend the funds on”. In July 2003, the treasurer of the PAC pleaded guilty to embezzling $119,021 between 1999 and 2003 and was sentenced to 15 months in prison. The thefts were not discovered until almost four years after they began. “It was a black mark on my judgment”, Bonilla said in a 2004 interview.

Finally, Bonilla was and always has been an “I’ve got mine, pull the ladder up” Reagan Republican. One of the false credos of that bunch is the “personal responsibility” mantra. We must take the responsibility for our own actions, failures included. The poor should stop blaming society, for example. Bonilla, with the aid of his wife’s TV anchor salary, heartily endorsed the “them negroes need to get over it” approach to social policy.
Now that he has lost his seat in Congress, and (please, God!) may have to abandon a run for the U.S. Senate, Bonilla is quick to step up to the plate and lay the blame for his loss on the courts, claiming the courts kept moving the goal posts.
That’s the kind of responsibility we have come to expect from Henry Bonilla.
The reality may lie more in the words of redistricting attorney Rolando Rios.

“The courts didn’t move the goal posts further down the field,” Rios said [to San Antonio Express-News columnist Carlos Guerra]. “They put them back where they were supposed to be.”

All in all, the defeat of Henry Bonilla is a comeuppance for the failed policies of the Bush Administration and the criminal shennanigans of Tom DeLay and his ilk.