just after the Republicans took over Congress, budget chairman John Kasich put out a hit list of 386 federal agencies slated for elimination. He said that Washington had become an “evil” city corrupted by special interests and bloated government. The idea was to remove government from large swaths of American life. But this July, the same John Kasich became a key co-sponsor, with Indiana senator Dan Coats, of a group of bills that inserts the federal government into large swaths of national life. The Coats proposal, called the Project for American Renewal, would use the tax code to encourage contributions to religious charities. It would encourage states to make divorce more difficult. There would be grants for adoption services and single-sex schools. “The fact that government programs have not worked is no excuse for those in government not to act,” Kasich and Coats wrote in a Washington Times op-ed.

Kasich is no hypocrite; he’d still like to cut those agencies. But he has shifted his emphasis, and that shift perfectly captures the way many Republicans have reacted to the failures of 1995. The direct assault on the size of government was a flop, so they’re looking for other approaches.