Last Friday, Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) announced that Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-CA) would head the Immigration Subcommittee — a position expected to go to Rep. Steve King (R-IA), the lead ranking Republican of the subcommittee last year.

Apparently, King isn’t taking the news too well. Just a few hours after finding out, King told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren that not assigning him as head of the subcommittee “makes a difference on the effectiveness [of the subcommittee], and it clearly does.” Now, the National Journal reports that King is also going after House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH):

Even in the wake of the “unbelievably tragic” news of the Arizona massacre, King was obviously still smarting from the subcommittee rebuff. He didn’t mince words in placing the blame directly at House Speaker John Boehner. “The speaker holds the big gavel, and he decides who gets the other gavels,” King said. “It makes it very clear that it’s not a meritocracy.” [...]

“John Boehner isn’t very aggressive on immigration,” King said, noting that the GOP “Pledge to America” barely mentions immigration or border security. “It’s the tiniest section,” he said.

While it’s true that Boehner isn’t traditionally counted amongst the House’s immigration hawks, King is skipping over the rather obvious motivations which guided the GOP’s decision. Gallegly’s immigration stance certainly isn’t a moderate one, but he has been able to talk about where he stands on the issue without resorting to the offensive and inflammatory rhetoric that King has notoriously employed.

Gallegly has maintained a much lower public profile on immigration in recent years. Yet, as far as their actual policy positions go, King and Gallegly have a lot in common. The anti-immigrant group NumbersUSA gives both lawmakers an “A” grade for exhibiting a commitment to legislation aimed at lowering both legal and illegal immigration over the course of their careers. The organization’s website shows that, like King, Gallegly has been at the forefront of the effort to deny the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants citizenship and has joined King in co-sponsoring several bills aimed at blocking any legalization programs and establishing ramped-up interior enforcement mechanisms such as a mandatory E-Verify system and the deputization of immigration law.

Gallegly’s impact on the immigration issue also goes a lot farther back than King’s. In 2004 he was one of the few Republicans who co-sponsored a bill that would’ve essentially required hospitals to check the immigration status of its patients. As far back as 1991, Gallegly was already railing on birthright citizenship. Back in 1996, he introduced the Gallegly Amendment to the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act which would have overturned the Plyler v. Doe Supreme Court decision and allowed states to deny public education or charge tuition to undocumented children. It passed the House but was removed from the final bill.

Though King is notably disappointed about the GOP leadership’s decision, anti-immigrant groups don’t seem too concerned. The designated hate group, Federation for American Immigration Reform, congratulated Gallegly “on his well-deserved appointment.” Meanwhile, immigration advocates are anything but relieved. “Until the Republican Party actually changes position on immigration, their ugly faces will still define them,” stated America’s Voice.

Max Boot’s new article on the Obama administration’s proposed defense cuts does not begin well:

In 1991, at the end of the Cold War, there were 710,821 active-duty soldiers in the U.S. Army. By 2001, that figure was down to 478,918. That 32 percent decline in active-duty strength severely limited our options for a military response to 9/11, practically dictating that the forces sent to Afghanistan and Iraq would be too small to pacify two countries with a combined population of nearly 60 million. The result was years of protracted conflict that put a severe strain on an undersized force.

This is rank revisionism. Going into Afghanistan and Iraq with a relatively small force was in no sense — no, not even “practically” — dictated by Clinton era defense cuts. It was a choice the Bush administration made. This has been widely reported and analyzed. A considerable number of books have been written about it. An Army general was publicly humiliated over it. It is not a secret.

It certainly wasn’t a secret to Boot at the time. Here he is back in Summer 2003, hailing “The New American Way of War“:

Spurred by dramatic advances in information technology, the new American way of war relies on speed, maneuver, flexibility, and surprise. This approach was put on display in the invasion of Iraq and should reshape what the military looks like. [...]

Traditionally, war colleges have taught that to be sure of success, an attacking force must have a 3 to 1 advantage — a ratio that goes up to 6 to 1 in difficult terrain such as urban areas. Far from having a 3 to 1 advantage in Iraq, coalition ground forces (which never numbered more than 100,000) faced a 3 to 1 or 4 to 1 disadvantage.

That the United States and its allies won anyway — and won so quickly — must rank as one of the signal achievements in military history. Previously, the gold standard of operational excellence had been the German blitzkrieg through the Low Countries and France in 1940. The Germans managed to conquer France, the Netherlands, and Belgium in just 44 days, at a cost of “only” 27,000 dead soldiers. The United States and Britain took just 26 days to conquer Iraq (a country 80 percent of the size of France), at a cost of 161 dead, making fabled generals such as Erwin Rommel and Heinz Guderian seem positively incompetent by comparison.

Do you sense Boot’s alarm here at the limits imposed by the Clinton administration’s defense cuts? Neither do I.

Later in the 2003 article, Boot scoffed at those who worried about continued Iraqi resistance:

A media frenzy ensued, with numerous stories suggesting that the offensive was bogged down and that the war could last months and result in thousands of casualties. Leading the charge was a platoon of retired generals who suggested that Rumsfeld had placed the invasion in jeopardy by not sending enough troops.

Silly generals. (Of course, Boot eventually came around and clambered aboard the “blame it on Rumsfeld” bandwagon, writing, without a trace of irony, “Rumsfeld won total responsibility for all facets of Operation Iraqi Freedom, but he never accepted the blame, except in the most perfunctory way, when everything went awry.”)

As for the current piece, Boot uses his comically obvious ret-conning to scold the Obama administration for its proposed reductions in force size, reasoning that reducing the Army’s active duty strength to 517,000 could dangerously constrain America’s ability to invade and occupy the entire rest of the world plus the Moon, should the need arise. It’s incredibly silly stuff that doesn’t merit much of a response beyond mockery, but it does bring to mind a point that my colleague Matt Yglesias has made, which is that neocons like Boot are essentially the opposite of pacifists: They believe that military violence is always the solution, and if military violence doesn’t work, that’s obviously only because you’ve failed to apply the correct amount of military violence. And yet, one-note force fetishists like Boot are considered part of the “serious” conversation, while pacifists are seen as naive, unrealistic and undeserving of prestigious perches at the Council on Foreign Relations. I would suggest that this tends to skew the foreign policy discourse in a particular direction.