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What Are They Smoking? The Wit and Wisdom of America's Republicans       By J. Woodruff

The Rush to Foreignization
Some of America's leading conservative Republicans are trying to speed up the foreignization of the U.S. Thanks to massive Third World immigration, America's European heritage faces extinction by 2050. That's when, according to Census Bureau projections, non-whites will become a majority of the U.S. population. But instead of trying to conserve America's heritage, conservatives led by right-wing Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-UT, are taking the first steps toward opening the presidency to the foreign-born. Hatch, who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, held a two-hour hearing last month on his plan to amend the Constitution by repealing the Founding Fathers' requirement that only persons born in the U.S. may become president. The repeal idea was first circulated among Republicans in the right-wing National Review magazine by writer John Miller, a protege of Hispanic immigration advocate Linda Chavez. Conservatives think the plan will make Republicans look good to the immigrants they're importing as cheap labor for their corporate contributors. Sen. Hatch says the Constitution's prohibition of a foreign-born president is "antiquated."

Strained Rhetoric
Fearing disaffections from the disappointed rank and file, Republicans over the years have resorted to increasingly dubious arguments to convince conservative voters to support the party's decidedly un-conservative candidates. In this year's election, one of the strangest rhetorical stretches came from Republican columnist and ABC News pundit George Will. In an early September column, he told his readers that Goldwater conservatism "made a comeback" at the GOP convention in New York. That's the conclave that showcased liberal Republicans California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and former New York Mayor Rudolph Guiliani. Will insisted that their prominence was evidence of Goldwater's powerful legacy, saying, "the prominent display and rapturous reception of Rudy Guiliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger demonstrated that such conservatism is not an insurmountable impediment to a person's reaching the party's highest echelons." But if the political spectrum has shifted so far left that Schwarzenegger and Guiliani are the equivalent of Goldwater conservatives, then Pol Pot and Joe Stalin must have been mere liberal reformers. Will's point - rather oblique and hard to swallow - is that Schwarzenegger and Guiliani, who are known to be liberals on social questions, represent the "respectability of conservatism with a socially libertarian cast - Goldwaterism." Goldwater, of course, was known to be fairly libertarian on the so-called social issues. But the problem with Will's overly large paint brush is simply this: Goldwater, most unlike Schwarzenegger and Guiliani, was also somewhat of an individualist on the non-social issues, which is a large part of what made him a conservative in the first place. Goldwater, for example, voted against the Constitution-stripping Civil Rights Act of 1964. He opposed gun control. And welfare. Schwarzenegger and Guiliani are predictably quite left-wing on those subjects - and lots of others, too. Come to think of it, there really isn't very much that Schwarzenegger and Guiliani have in common with Goldwater, after all - except being mentioned in the same breath by a columnist with the political acuity of Mr. Magoo.

A Little Late
The formerly conservative but now centrist Republican National Review finally noticed that massive Hispanic immigration is harmful to the GOP's political health. "For the Democrats, ... bringing new Latin American immigrants into the country is like importing more Upper West Siders or more sociology Ph. D.s - it adds directly to the Democratic voter rolls," wrote NR editor Rich Lowry in a September online edition.. His discovery comes rather late, about a decade or more after other real conservatives and immigration reform activists issued the same warning - way back when the GOP could have actually acted to save its own skin, and maybe the country's. Lowry and the other slow learners at NR have yet to notice the dramatic demographic impact the U.S. Census Bureau predicts immigration will bring to the U.S. in 2050 when a majority of the population becomes non-white. Does NR advocate conserving America's European-derived people and heritage? No one knows. Judging from their track record, the sharp-eyed analysts at NR probably won't get around to airy speculations on the meaning of those demographic changes until sometime in 2049, if at all.