To Washington insiders, Republican commitment to fiscal discipline has been broken a thousand times. They laugh when they hear Republicans go to the House floor to excoriate Democrats as old tax-and-spend liberals. And they roll their eyes as so-called Republican budget hawks simultaneously call for an extension of the Bush tax cuts, a major factor contributing to endless budget deficits.The entire column is an illustration of unusually partisan framing and selection of facts. The current situation has an extremely important context going back thirty year to Ronald Reagan. Reagan faced an America that believed itself to be in decline, that had lost its confidence and its nerve in the face of unchecked Soviet aggression and the constant drumbeat of domestic partisans--many of them later revealed as agents of the Soviet Union, and many not--claiming that the era of America was over and the era of socialism had begun. Reagan's plan was most likely the best available: militarily outspend a Soviet Union that he knew could never keep up. The military had languished during the Carter years, a victim of liberal neglect and post-Vietnam malaise. This military build-up required the assistance of a Congress controlled by a Democratic party turned away from its old hawkish ways and focused on increasing social spending; the resulting compromise, in which both sides would simply spend a lot more on what they wanted, made sense at the time and was certainly a bipartisan effort. That doesn't mean that Reagan was simply a big spender; some of his attempts to limit government spending on social programs are reviled by liberals to this day.
After the collapse of the USSR and the subsequent election of Bill Clinton to the presidency, Republicans began to concentrate on decreasing spending again. No compromises needed this time; there was no need for a large military build-up anymore, with our major enemy out of the way. The 1994 Contract With America ushered in the first Republican house majority in decades, and a Senate majority as well. Its leader, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich--a former college professor--outlined plans, bitterly opposed by liberals, for term limits, tax reductions, and cuts in spending. A battle erupted; Democrats pulled out every demagogic attack in the book. Those who paid attention to politics in the Nineties might remember how Republicans were attacked for depriving poor children of hot school lunches. Gingrich did not back down, and decided to bring government to a standstill in an attempt to force Clinton to reduce spending. Clinton refused, and the public disapproved of the government shutdown enough for Clinton to prevail. The GOP then passed a line-item veto for spending bills, which was promptly struck down by the Supreme Court. Only welfare reform, a major platform of the 1994 Republican invasion, was successful--and Bill Clinton, after several vetoes, signed and took credit for it.
The general defeat of the Republicans in the spending battles of the Nineties--also hurried along by a booming economy that increased tax revenues without really increasing taxes--led many congressional Republicans to abandon the spending restraints that had originally been so popular. A battle simmered among Republicans, won largely by the bigger spenders with George W. Bush's ascendancy to the White House, with his "compassionate conservatism." Now, the nation had three fiscal camps: a Democratic Party that continued to advocate high taxation and high spending, a GOP wing dominated by social conservatives that wanted moderate spending and low taxation, and a GOP wing dominated by fiscal conservatives and often social moderates who wanted both low spending and low taxation. The battle between the two GOP wings continues to this day, as witnessed in the recent GOP congressional summits and their battles for relevant chairmanships between big earmarkers and fiscal hawks like Jeff Flake and John Campbell.
The truth is that the column above does not ever say how the Democratic Party is more fiscally responsible; the truth is that, although they may have reined in earmarks, they have repeatedly resisted efforts at illuminating the process and have refused to institute a GOP-proposed moratorium on earmarking. But the real issues, the real reasons why the federal budget will continue to balloon--Social Security and Medicare--will never be addressed and will likely only be expanded by Democrats, especially those who are currently running for president. Although an unfortunate number of GOP members have proved themselves totally irresponsible in those areas as well, there are simply no Democrats at all who have proposed meaningful reform in those two all-important areas. The Republican Party is still the nation's only hope for fiscal reform.
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