Whatever happened to the Republican Party’s fiscal conservatism? So asks the columnist Max Boot, who is newly skeptical of John Bolton, preventive wars, and red ink emanating from Washington under the control of the red states’ party.
“In order to accommodate President Trump, the Republican Party has betrayed its principles on issues including Russia, immigration, free trade and fiscal austerity,” Boot began one recent column.
“The spending legislation — which puts the deficit on track to pass $1 trillion in 2019 — faced little meaningful opposition from Republican lawmakers despite years of GOP complaints that federal expenditures were out of control,” Ashley Parker complained in another.
Unlike Twitter feuds with Alec Baldwin, however, fiscal profligacy under a Republican president is not a new innovation by Trump. The federal budget passed $1 trillion for the first time in history while President Ronald Reagan was in office. It eclipsed $2 trillion and then $3 trillion on President George W. Bush’s watch. It will zoom past $4 trillion under Trump.
Both Reagan and Bush also presided over large increases in the national debt. Bush watched the first budget surpluses since 1969 eventually give way to $1 trillion deficits. Under Reagan, the deficit spiked to 6.3 percent of GDP before receding in his second term.
The $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill Trump signed into law is indefensible, but he is following a familiar Republican trajectory: increase defense spending, do little to address entitlements that are long-term drivers of the debt, cut taxes, and run huge deficits.
Reagan can justifiably be given something of a pass. His economic reforms and defense spending whipped stagflation and the Soviet Union, respectively, the most enduring postwar conservative policy accomplishments. He had to contend with 70 percent tax rates without ever having a Republican-controlled House. He was the first modern conservative ever elected to the presidency.
Bush can’t point to a comparable record even though he exhorted a Republican Congress to pass the largest new entitlement program since the Great Society via the deficit-funded Medicare prescription drug benefit. He worked with Ted Kennedy to grow the Department of Education, which Republicans once pledged to abolish, through No Child Left Behind. He approved a $700 billion Wall Street bailout. Non-defense discretionary spending rose faster than under President Bill Clinton.
That’s not even getting into the price tag for the Iraq War and the remainder of the Bush “freedom agenda.” Though in fairness, the ledger might look slightly different if the 43rd president hadn’t waited until his second term to spend “political capital” on Social Security reform.
In fact, congressional Republicans’ biggest spending successes arguably came from working with a reluctant Clinton in the 1990s and forcing sequestration on President Barack Obama. Neither of these achievements lasted.
Republicans have always talked a better game on spending and debt in opposition than they have played when in power. They campaign like President Calvin Coolidge and govern like President Lyndon Johnson.
The country has for decades muddled through an uneasy compromise in which we more or less maintain the Republicans’ tax rates, the Democrats’ entitlement programs and both parties’ wars. Trump is hardly unique in this regard and frankly did less to pretend he was a government-cutter than some previous GOP hopefuls.
In some ways, Trump’s deregulation and support for a proven fiscal conservative like Mick Mulvaney as budget director was better than could have been hoped for during the 2016 campaign.
That is not to say Trump is blameless. He harnessed the forces that were most likely to lead to Republican support for limited government — populism and the Tea Party — and exploited them for big-government purposes. With the significant exception of regulations and the recent tax cut, Trump has diluted the more libertarian inclinations of American conservatism more than any Republican president since President Richard Nixon.
Bush imposed steel tariffs and Reagan sought to protect American motorcycle and auto manufacturers from imports. Yet Trump is more comprehensively protectionist on trade than either of them.
Simply by running for president when he did, Trump deprived conservatives of their best chance to have the Republican Party nominate one of their own since Reagan and Barry Goldwater. If Trump had stayed on television or in Trump Tower, a principle fiscal conservative like Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, or even Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., might have beaten a weak establishment favorite like Jeb Bush (the general election against Hillary Clinton still would have been difficult).
Nevertheless, House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., might have had a much different governing partner than Trump, with a slightly better chance to make his roadmaps a reality.
The federal government grows unchecked for two reasons: The voters want it, and even when they don’t, they must choose between two big-government parties: one with a small limited-government faction and one without.
In such an environment, the Grand Old Spending Party is nothing new.
