Jack Hunter is right on target in his Jan. 24 column lamenting the lack of fiscal responsibility among self-proclaimed conservative Republicans on Capitol Hill. What’s worse, those Republicans are ignoring history showing their profligacy is bad politics, too.
In the past 25 years, Republicans have thrived in congressional elections when they actually act like fiscal conservatives. When they don’t so act, they lose.
In 1994, the “Newt Gingrich Congress” swept into office promising numerous policy reforms combined with fiscal responsibility. For the first two years, the Gingrichians delivered very well on both. Even against opposition from then-President Bill Clinton, they successfully pushed through $50 billion in raw-dollar savings from domestic discretionary appropriations in just two years — and roughly $100 billion from the prior “baseline” of “projected” spending. They also implemented minor reforms slowing growth of Medicare spending and enacted major welfare reform that saved, over 20 years, hundreds of billions of federal dollars.
To do some of these things, they participated in two government “shutdown” battles that the media said would spell their political doom. The media was wrong, Even as Clinton, wrongly claiming credit for welfare reform, won re-election handily over Republican Bob Dole, Republicans held their House and Senate majorities.
Two years later, though, when political precedent suggested the president’s party always loses seats in the midterm elections in his sixth year, Gingrich himself predicted a 30-seat GOP pickup while most pundits predicted at least a net 15-seat Republican House gain. But in a bad tradeoff, Gingrich imposed tough terms on the impending impeachment inquiry while caving, a month before the election, on fiscal rectitude. Result: The expected 15-seat gain became a five-seat loss, barely holding the majority.
Republicans rebuilt House and Senate majorities early in the new millennium, but completely abandoned fiscal discipline by expanding government. Their big spending, which they thought would buy public support, failed spectacularly. They lost a net of six Senate seats and 31 House seats in 2006, relinquishing majorities they long had held in both chambers.
Republicans of course recaptured both houses, substantially, when the Tea Party arose and demanded renewed conservatism in 2010. Even against super-liberal President Barack Obama, the new majorities actually delivered: Total domestic discretionary spending didn’t even keep pace with inflation, rising from $550 billion in 2010 to $560 billion in 2016. (See Table 5.6, here. Keeping pace with inflation would have pushed the total in 2016 to $606 billion.)
Amid the newfound fiscal restraint, Republicans kept their majorities in both chambers throughout. But in 2018, they went hog wild, adding a stunning $63 billion (not yet reflected in Table 5.6, which the White House hasn’t updated) in a single year. And, sure enough, Republicans badly lost the subsequent elections, blowing their majority while Democrats achieved their biggest House pickups since Watergate.
All this history completely belies the idea that Republicans do worse politically when they are fiscally responsible than they do when they spend and brag about “bringing home the bacon.” Correlation is not necessarily causation, of course: Many other factors, including impeachment and wars and President Trump’s personality also affect election results. But when there is an absolutely inverse correlation between big spending and Republican success in the elections immediately following, it certainly shows the spending doesn’t help And it’s quite likely that it hurts.
This makes sense: Turnout among the Republican economic “base” in Middle America gets depressed when its concerns are ignored.
Big spending is bad policy. If Republican officeholders actually realized it is bad politics, too, they might pull us back from the brink of a debt crisis.
