I’m not at all worried about big business “changing sides”. For one thing, the Chamber of Commerce is always going to be on its own side, and the size of government issues related to an aging population will create plenty of common ground (especially on taxation) between conservatives and most business interests for the foreseeable future. What is interesting about John Feehery’s cry from the heart is less what it says about business, and more what it says about the arrogance of America’s contemporary lobbyist class.

Feehery, the Barbour clan, and the rest of the Washington Republican operative class thought they had immigration policy wired. Henry Barbour helped write the Republican National Committee’s “autopsy” that called for a “comprehensive” immigration reform that amounted to amnesty, plus low-skill guest worker programs, plus delayed (probably permanently delayed) enforcement. Haley Barbour brought the billionaires along. The intraparty opposition was underfunded and disoriented from the results of the 2012 election.

Yet for all of their advantages, the lobbyists were not able to win the intraparty argument over immigration policy. Feehery’s comments are better understood as sign of his frustration that the other elements of the center-right won’t show sufficient deference to his bosses. Gaining that deference to the business interests is Feehery’s job and he is failing at it. The problem is that the Feehery’s have sold their clients an unrealistic idea of what their place can be in center-right politics. The business interests can be part of the coalition, but they cannot be the coalition. There will also be issues on which some of the business interests will politically diverge from the broader center-right. That is what is so liberating about thinking of the business interests as … interests.

Canada and Australia manage to have governing center-right parties that support skills-based immigration policies. In Canada, the center-right party even manages to draw significant support from immigrants. Business interests can be part of a successful relatively lower tax, lower regulation, lower spending political coalition. They just can’t have everything they want. They are never going to get everything they want from anybody. They sure aren’t going to get a better long-term deal from Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats. Expecting everything will just lead to more lobbyists shrieking in the pages of the Wall Street Journal.