How to lose friends

WHO SAYS John Boozman, the Republican senator from Arkansas, isn’t doing what he can to assure the success of the Democratic Party?

Along with a few of his more xenophobic colleagues in the U.S. Senate, he voted against a comprehensive reform of American immigration policy that was approved by an overwhelming vote of 68 to 32 just last month. Senator Boozman was doing what he could to assure that the next generation of Hispanic voters will be solidly Democratic, for all of us tend to remember how our people were treated when they were new immigrants-reasonably and generously, with open arms and a helping hand, or with ill-disguised suspicion and petty harassment. The latter is a sure way to become a permanent minority in this nation of immigrants.

In this fight, John Boozman is taking on demography, a force much more powerful than any political party. As a Republican senator from South Carolina named Lindsey Graham well understands, for he has warned that the GOP faces a “demographic death spiral” if it continues to oppose immigration reform.

John Boozman isn’t the only one trying to make Republicans a permanent minority in this country. In an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal the other day, a rising Republican congressman from Arkansas who’s his party’s great hope in this state and maybe beyond,Tom Cotton, put together a number of niggling objections to the Senate’s great-and bipartisan-step forward when it comes to immigration reform.

The congressman’s objections could be ironed out in a conference committee should the House ever pass an immigration bill of its own. Except that Congressman Cotton also objects to sending any House bill on immigration to conference. He prefers just presenting the Senate with a House bill, take it or leave it-a sure way to make certain it’ll leave it.

Here’s hoping The Hon. Tom Cotton will have second and better thoughts. The future of his party, not to mention the country’s, depends on a reasonable approach even to the most volatile of issues.

Here’s hoping, too, that American conservatism, like American liberalism before it, will not become just an opposite but equal form of ideological infatuation, putting easy-to-milk political fears and resentments above the interests of all, which the men who framed the Constitution of the United States called the General Welfare. All of us need to rededicate ourselves to it.

A great senator-yes, there once were such-by the name of Henry M. Jackson was criticized on one occasion by his fellow liberals for not hewing strictly enough to the current party line. “I’m a liberal,” Scoop Jackson replied, “but I try not to be a damfool.” It’s a lesson conservatives would do well to learn, too.