There’s a lot of great stories to read on the main page today, but one is the ‘don’t miss’ story of the day — as it goes to the heart of a significant issue: Distraught Republicans Lambasting One Another.
Because of out-of-control spending in Washington, D.C., by a Republican President and a Republican Congress, the GOP can’t really credibly hold the mandle of being a party of limited government, can it? The fire and drive of the Class of ’94 is gone. Republicans inside the Beltway have to rely on the War on Terror to bump ratings because they cannot run on a record of having reined in the size and scope of the federal government. On the contrary, as the Chairman of the libertarian CATO institute says in the Chronicle piece, "The growth of federal spending has been the highest since Lyndon Johnson."
Republicans may be divided over the war in Iraq, civil liberties, immigration, and the struggle between religious and economic conservatives. But one thing that unifies party members of all persuasions is a profound dismay at what they see as profligate spending by Congress under President Bush.
Fighting big government has been a GOP lodestar since Barry Goldwater was nominated for the presidency in 1964. It animated Ronald Reagan’s presidency, helped deny George H.W. Bush a second term when he violated his "read-my-lips" no-new-tax pledge, and became the defining battle of the Gingrich revolution in 1994, leading to a government shutdown in a face-off with Democratic President Bill Clinton.
When the younger Bush was elected in 2000, Republicans gained unified control of the White House, the House and, for most of the last six years, the Senate.
Yet what majority control produced was lavish farm subsidies; the Medicare drug bill, which is the biggest entitlement expansion since the Great Society; enormous funding increases for Cabinet departments Republicans once pledged to eliminate; highway bills larded with bridges to nowhere; and a galaxy of special spending earmarks for individual lawmakers’ pet projects — along with an invasion of Iraq.
Former Representative John Kasich talks about the out-of-control spending, and makes a Schwarzenegger reference:
Kasich said he fought the good fight — achieving the first budget surplus since man walked on the moon, even managing to eliminate programs — but he said he began meeting resistance after that.
"Maybe in a way, they got too comfortable with power," Kasich said of his former colleagues. "On both sides it’s about either keeping power or getting it."
Kasich said budget discipline began to unravel in the late 1990s with a pork-filled highway bill. "The minute we did that, it was a signal," he said. "It was the beginning of the end."
"You don’t make a lot of friends in politics when you take things away from people," Kasich argued. "It’s hard. Look at all politicians; look at the governor of California. His popularity has gone up as he’s passed more stuff out, and when he wanted to take something away, he became unpopular. … When you run in a political campaign and you face a million dollars worth of ads that tell everybody that you’re trying to throw their grandmother out in the street, it’s tough."
Make sure you read the entire article here.
October 8th, 2006 at 12:00 am
I responded to this article this morning, too, over at SpeakOutCA.org, but in a nutshell: what’s happening here goes far beyond simple corruption. This is what the wholesale failure of a governing philosophy looks like.
The simple fact is that most Americans greatly enjoy the freedoms they have that go far beyond those of owning property. Norquist’s formulation of the core of the movment, as quoted elsewhere in the article – “low-tax, greater freedom” – doesn’t make sense: freedom is just plain a lot bigger than that.
I don’t know where conservativism goes from here, but it seems like acknowledging that fact is going to have to be part of it.
October 8th, 2006 at 12:00 am
That was a very good article which depending on the side you come down on politically really gets to the heart of most differences between conservatives and liberals.
I consider myself a liberal and a lot of why I come down on that side has to do with Keynes’ belief that human nature will always encourage those seeking political favor to pander to those that already have power and because of that he argued that it is necessary to establish a culture of government help going to those who are at the bottom of the ladder first. That is the unifying argument of most people in the Democratic party today.
Some Democrats go all the way to socialism, some only support government help in a couple of very specific areas like say public schools, but it’s generally the case that they argue for some sort of guaranteed “safety net” (the term first used by FDR) for the people.
Republicans on the other hand will make the case accurately that private enterprise is always less wasteful in the long run than government spending and will also generally argue that a culture of encouraging cuts to government spending will eventually cause all of the subsidies that currently favor the rich to eventually wither away. The exact argument that Viguerie is making is the belief conservative theorists have about what will eventually happen as they press forward in the fight for less government. They think it will wither and die and that they shouldn’t hesitate to expose their allies that are not moving quickly enough to cut government back.
For a conservative believer, the actions they dislike of the current Republican leadership are a temporary stop along the way, while most Democrats believe that it is the natural state of affairs when Conservatives run things. The rich get even more subsidies and at the same time, services that benefit the poor and disadvantaged get cut.
It would be interesting to come back fifty or a hundred years from now and see how it all winds up playing out.
October 8th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Mr. Ancona:
My hope is that conservatism morphs/accomodates a federalist philosophy.
I believe that the only way to check the growth of government at the federal level is through federalism. Of course, we must have governors with the “testicular fortitude” to stand up to the federal behemoth.
Ultimately, if Congress continues to spit in the faces of its citizens, immigration matters might be just such a vehicle with which states might be able to reassert themselves.
The GOP mantra should be local control. State over federal. City over state.
Just my two cents.