And his purpose is …
U.S. Sen. John Boozman said last week that he trusts whatever the Trump administration says and that he plans to run again in 2022 because he stands to become chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee.
And there, in two assertions, one pliable and the other ironic—both encased in bland niceness—is your senior U.S. senator from Arkansas.
Boozman appeared on the Talk Business and Politics program and said as follows when asked about Trump’s ordered assassination of the Iran general: “I can’t talk about it in the sense of specifics. I have confidence in these people. They were all in agreement that there was an imminent threat.”
He probably meant he could not discuss classified information related in a briefing from Trump administration officials. But an inability to speak with any unclassified command of specifics might apply as well.
Boozman is not about policy or the independent contemplation of it. He is the antithesis of J. William Fulbright. He is about staying tied for first place in the Donald Trump-Mitch McConnell rubber-stamp sweepstakes.
A more independently thinking and policy-confident arch-conservative Republican senator—Mike Lee of Utah, a blend of Tom Cotton, Rand Paul and the Tea Party—came out of that same Republican senatorial caucus’ Iranian briefing expressing anger and dismay.
Lee said that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark Esper had insulted senators’ intelligence with an utter lack of specificity about an imminent threat requiring the killing of the general. He said the Trump administration figures were flippant and dismissive in a way that suggested they didn’t think they owed senators a real explanation or— even more significantly—any input into what they might yet do.
Indeed, they probably won’t need to give a heads-up to John Boozman.
He simply thought they were really smart and that he should go along with them on whatever these specifics were, which he wouldn’t be able to go into.
And he seemed impressed that they were all in agreement, though it was their job to agree, or to pretend to agree.
Boozman is entitled to be the kind of senator that suits him. He has rather clearly decided that he’ll defer to others in his party to keep him covered on policy. He will go along with them with an utterly amiable and blindly trusting partisanship.
Meanwhile, he’ll continue his imitation of the late John Paul Hammerschmidt with intense and competent constituent service.
I’ve had liberal-minded people tell me that the good thing about Boozman’s office is that it keeps up expertly with things of importance to Arkansas.
It works politically. Boozman is entrenched so solidly that his declaration that he’ll likely seek a third term in 2022 leaves Gov. Asa Hutchinson without any evident place to go after being term-limited but still inclined, as he declares, to stay in politics.
Hutchinson could always run for president and put two Arkansans in the post-Trump Republican primary mix, with Tom Cotton the other. They could fight it out nationally for the soul of the Republican Party, between modulated meanness and meanness run amok.
There was a time when we thought no Arkansan could ever contend for the presidency. Now we put out presidential prospects in pairs.
The aforementioned irony with Boozman is that he bases his intended run for a third term on being in position to get a lofty position that Blanche Lincoln had achieved when he ran against her and booted her out of it.
It was so fleeting that perhaps you’d forgotten that Lincoln ascended to the Senate Agriculture Committee chairmanship in September 2009, only to get creamed by Boozman in November 2010.
She had 15 months of being somebody. Arkansas farmers had 15 months in which she had their backs.
It turned out that her influential perch was less a factor to Arkansas farmers than their horror that she had gone along with that Kenyan Muslim in extending health insurance to millions of Americans whether they were poor or afflicted with pre-existing conditions.
Boozman came along on the cusp of the Arkansas Republican revolution and essentially elevated a Democratic senator from Michigan named Debbie Stabenow to the agriculture perch he now cites as worthy of his running for a third term.
Boozman waits for elevation in 2021 when Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts, the current Republican chairman, retires. Stabenow is still the ranking Democrat on the committee, and she would ascend should Democrats take back the Senate, a moderate possibility.
That would seem to leave Boozman with no re-election purpose at all.
Obviously, though, there are things more important than the chairmanship of the Senate Agriculture Committee. Amiably going along with whatever Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Mike Pompeo and Mark Esper say would seem to be chief among them.