Arizona lawmaking, Vegas-style

“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” as the famed Sin City motto goes. When it comes to ideas about fixing illegal immigration, the New York Times editorial board hopes Phoenix will adopt the same rule. For the Gray Lady concludes that Washington's failure to enact immigration reform has given license to a particularly scary brand of nuttiness in Arizona.

Fueled by frustration (and, methinks, lack of adult supervision), Republican lawmakers here are home-brewing all manner of harebrained “solutions” that end up defying federal enforcement rules and "shouldering aside civil rights and the Constitution." Such efforts, the editorial finds, amount to "vigilantism." Though Arizona-style copycat laws are being examined across the nation, the news is not all bad.

The Times notes that in dozens of states, "elected officials, law enforcers, business owners, religious leaders and regular citizens are providing the calm voices and cool judgment that are lacking in the shimmering heat of Phoenix. They are reminding their representatives that replacing federal immigration policy with a crazy quilt of state-led enforcement schemes is only a recipe for more lawlessness and social disruption, for expensive lawsuits and busted budgets, lost jobs and boycotts. And all without fixing the problem."

The Times concludes that a "peculiar mix of nativism and immigration panic has pushed the immigration debate far out into the desert of extremism. It’s going to take a serious effort by saner voices to ensure that what happens in Arizona stays there." Great. It's so nice to get top billing, Vegas-style, in the newspaper of record – you know, in front of God and everybody – and then held up to editorial ridicule. As Elvis would say: Thank you, Arizona lawmakers, thank you very much.