In 2010, a new movement was born, dedicated to instilling a sense of fiscal responsibility among our leaders in Washington.
This crusade, known as the Tea Party, was meant to finally be our way of telling the government that enough was enough when it came to runaway spending on bloated social programs, endless wars in the Middle East, and bailouts for massive banks that seemed to only benefit Wall Street. With a national debt that had grown to $14 trillion by the end of 2010, it seemed that the Tea Party had come just in time to stop our country from spiraling even further into unsustainable debt.
Today, nine years later, we finally have a Republican in the White House, the federal courts are confirming conservative judges at record levels, and the unemployment rate is at 3.6%, the lowest in years. Everything seems perfect — until you take a quick glance at the country’s balance sheet, that is. We currently face a staggering $23 trillion in national debt, almost double the $14 trillion debt that first drove Republicans to Tea Party protests in 2010.
So what’s happened to all our concern over fiscal conservatism?
The answer, it seems, is that elected Republicans never actually cared about the deficit in the first place. When Obama was president, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell became one of Washington’s loudest voices against the Democrat’s proposals, in favor of reducing the federal deficit. Four years after Obama’s stimulus passed in 2009, McConnell warned that unless immediate steps were taken to address the national debt, future generations of Americans may not have access to current entitlement programs like Social Security.
“Only one thing can save this country, and that’s to get a handle on this deficit and debt issue,” said McConnell, then-Senate minority leader. “No action means the demise” of entitlement programs, he continued. “We have to assure they will be there for future generations.”
Fast forward to 2018, and President Trump occupies the White House, Republicans control the Senate, and McConnell is begging his current Senate colleague and Tea Party loyalist Rand Paul to keep his mouth shut over continued runaway spending.
It’s become painfully clear that leaders in both parties share equal blame for running up a massive deficit that will almost certainly become the responsibility of millennials and Generation Z in the coming decades. It’s also now clear that voters have absolutely no reason to believe any Republican politician who has the gall to give a speech railing against Democrats for running up the federal deficit, while not even hiding their congressional vote that raises that same deficit and brings back lavish earmarks to keep the voters in their district happy.
As Rand Paul wisely noted in a speech calling out his fellow Republicans for abandoning their conservative principles, fiscal hypocrisy appears any time Republicans gain power.
“When the Democrats are in power, Republicans appear to be the conservative party,” said Paul. “But when Republicans are in power, it seems there is no conservative party. The hypocrisy hangs in the air and chokes anyone with a sense of decency or intellectual honesty.”
John Patrick (@john_pat_rick) is a graduate of Canisius College and Georgia Southern University. He interned for Red Alert Politics during the summer of 2012 and has continued to contribute to the Washington Examiner regularly.
