With the Christmas break come assessments by the talking heads in the cable wars like yours truly and other alleged experts concerning who won and lost politically in the year just ended.
About the only area of agreement I’ve detected among these august evaluations of the Republican majority elected to the House of Representatives in the 2010 congressional election is a negative one. With the bitter taste of the payroll tax debacle still fresh, the experts are mostly saying the House GOP failed.
There have, of course, been arguments among conservatives and Republicans about why that alleged failure has come about, with some arguing House Speaker John Boehner and his leadership team weren’t aggressive enough in confronting President Obama and the Senate Democratic majority led by Sen. Harry Reid, and others concluding that the GOP House failed to compromise enough.
It is impossible to know with certainty, which school of thought is correct, but there is one measure of House Republicans’ performance in 2011 that is grounded in the raw numbers — did they have an impact one way or the other on total federal spending?
Since the most frequently and intensely expressed voter worries in the 2010 election concerned the long-term damage being done to the nation’s future economic health by Obama’s record increase in federal spending and the national debt (and secondarily by that of his predecessor in the Oval Office), the budget ought to be the bottom line measure of the House GOP.
Say what you will about the payroll tax cut, or the super-committee deal or the national debt hike, the fact is the House GOP all-but succeeded in stopping the spending increase in its tracks.
As The Wall Street Journal editorial page points out today, total federal outlays zoomed from $2.79 trillion under President George W. Bush in 2007 to $3.65 trillion for 2012. The biggest jump during that period came in 2009 when Obama’s first budget – including his $787 billion economic stimulus program – pushed the total from $2.98 trillion to $3.51 trillion.
As the Journal observed, “voters elected a GOP House to pull the Democratic credit card, and Republicans at least stopped the blowout of the Pelosi-Obama years.” Boehner and company deserve vastly more credit for this accomplishment – which is the essential first step in rescuing the country from Obama – than they have thus far received on the Right.
But there is more to this story than the mere numbers tell us. House Republicans, led by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, also got the lower chamber back on track with the law.
That is, they adhered to the requirements of the 1974 Budget and Impoundment Control Act, that product of the Watergate era that has since governed the process by Congress is expected to produce annual federal spending plans.
The Democratic Senate hasn’t done this in nearly three years, but Boehner and Ryan got it done in May. Their reward was to be savaged by Democrats and their mainstream media enablers for allegedly destroying Medicare and the social safety net.
The television spot showing an actor portraying Ryan pushing Granny in a wheelchair over the cliff represented the purest expression of this Democratic demagaugery.
Here’s something else the House GOP ought to be praised for – they passed a couple of dozen job-creation bills and sent them to the Senate. Unfortunately, that’s where they died, thanks to Reid, who concluded an utterly disreputable year of standing athwart the economic recovery with his ludicrous claim that there is no such thing as “millionaire job-creators.”
Odds are, had the Senate and Obama approved at least some of these House GOP measures, that the unemployment rate would have dropped considerably more than it did in 2011, from 9.1 percent to 8.6 percent.
I tend to the school of thought that holds Boehner should have been much more aggressive in demanding actual spending reductions from Obama and Senate Democrats and House GOP leaders erred gravely in not giving vastly more prominence to the most articulate of the Tea Party endorsed freshmen.
That said, we conservatives have a tendency to expect instant perfection from Republicans who claim to share our agenda, but the reality is that winning one off-year election isn’t nearly enough.
In order for reform movements like the Tea Party to achieve genuine enduring change, they must win several consecutive elections, including at least one for the White House.
We can – and should – thank wee Jimmy Madison for this reality because the Constitution he more than any of the other founders fathered defuses and refracts the popular will over time to prevent momentary passions from overwhelming good sense.
It’s how we answer the question posed in the first Federalist paper by Alexander Hamilton – Madison’s most important ally in the constitutional debate that culminated in ratification – and thereby demonstrate that Americans are indeed capable of establishing and keeping “good government from reflection and choice,” instead of “accident and force.”
Conservatives of all people ought not have to be reminded of this fact.
Happy New Year!
Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner.
