Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics (32 page)

Ponnuru’s report would be akin to an item in a leading liberal magazine along these lines:

Spoke to both Clinton and Obama today and asked whether they intended to seize and nationalize all American industries after they are inaugurated. Clinton said she would have to consult first with lawyers and decide only after a full debate, and Obama said he would likely only nationalize some industries, perhaps not all.

Or:

Spoke to both Edwards and Clinton today and asked whether they intended to shut down conservative Christian churches. Edwards said he would want to hear the pros and cons from smart lawyers before he made up his mind, and Clinton said that she would want to use this authority infrequently.

Ponnuru’s report must be viewed in its context—the context being that the hero and icon of the Republican Party over the last seven years, George W. Bush, has, in fact, imprisoned U.S. citizens and insisted that he has the power to throw Americans into black holes indefinitely with no charges or review of any kind. That is the modern Republican Party. Its base, its ruling factions, simply do not believe in our most basic constitutional guarantees. For anyone who wants to dispute that, how is it possible to reconcile the above with any claim to the contrary?

Indeed, at this point, it is doubtful that any Republican candidate
could
simply stand up and emphatically oppose this grotesque idea without creating real problems for himself among Republican voters—not even so much because executive, due-process-less imprisonment is important to the Republican base, but rather because it has become a symbol of the Bush presidency, and one shows loyalty to the Movement by defending it (and is guilty of the worst sin—disloyalty—by opposing it). These days, it’s only those despicable liberals who whine about quaint “terrorist rights” like due process.

Hypocrites with Bad Credit

The Republican Party’s complete betrayal of its own alleged small-government principles is hardly confined to powers of detention, interrogation, spying, and lawbreaking. Quite the contrary, it extends into every realm of governance.

It has long been clear that there is nothing remotely limited about Republican governance in any area, nor do Republicans have an iota of mistrust of government when they are in power. There has been a long line of decidedly unconservative actions by the Bush administration that have been almost uniformly cheered on by the right wing—from exploding discretionary domestic spending to record deficits, to an emergency convening of the federal government to intervene in one woman’s end-of-life decisions, to attempts to federalize marriage and medical laws—all of which could not be any more alien to what has been meant by conservatism for the past forty years.

It is now inescapably clear that the Republican Party is anything but the party of limited government—more like the party of fiscal gluttony and recklessness. As an October 2007 article from McClatchy News Service documented,

Bush Is the Biggest Spender since LBJ

WASHINGTON—George W. Bush, despite all his recent bravado about being an apostle of small government and budget-slashing, is the biggest spending president since Lyndon B. Johnson. In fact, he’s arguably an even bigger spender than LBJ.

“He’s a big government guy,” said Stephen Slivinski, the director of budget studies at Cato Institute, a libertarian research group.

The numbers are clear, credible and conclusive, added David Keating, the executive director of the Club for Growth, a budget-watchdog group….

Take almost any yardstick and Bush generally exceeds the spending of his predecessors….

Discretionary spending went up in Bush’s first term by 48.5 percent, not adjusted for inflation,
more than twice as much as Bill Clinton did
(21.6 percent) in two full terms, Slivinski reports.

Indeed, ever since President Bush was inaugurated, discretionary, domestic spending has skyrocketed, both in absolute terms and when compared with the budget-balancing Clinton administration. In 2003, the libertarian Cato Institute published a detailed assessment of federal government spending over the last thirty years—titled
“Conservative” Bush Spends More Than “Liberal” Presidents Clinton, Carter.
Its conclusion:

But the real truth is that national defense is far from being responsible for all of the spending increases. According to the new numbers, defense spending will have risen by about 34 percent since Bush came into office. But, at the same time, non-defense discretionary spending will have skyrocketed by almost 28 percent. Government agencies that Republicans were calling to be abolished less than 10 years ago, such as education and labor, have enjoyed jaw-dropping spending increases under Bush of 70 percent and 65 percent respectively….

After all, in inflation-adjusted terms, Clinton had overseen a total spending increase of only 3.5 percent at the same point in his administration. More importantly, after his first three years in office, non-defense discretionary spending actually went down by 0.7 percent. This is contrasted by Bush’s three-year total spending increase of 15.6 percent and a 20.8 percent explosion in non-defense discretionary spending.

Those profligate spending patterns only worsened as the Bush presidency proceeded. In 2005, the right-wing American Enterprise Institute published a study by its own Veronique de Rugy and
Reason
magazine’s Nick Gillespie. The report was titled
Bush the Budget Basher,
and it concluded, “After five years of Republican reign, it’s time for small-government conservatives to acknowledge that the GOP has forfeited its credibility when it comes to spending restraint.”

Not only has President Bush violated every claimed tenet of conservatism when it comes to restraints on federal spending, he ranks among the most fiscally reckless presidents in modern times—so insists the pro-Bush AEI:

“After 11 years of Republican majority we’ve pared [the budget] down pretty good,” Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas) crowed a few weeks back during ongoing budget deliberations. But nothing could be farther from the truth, at least since the GOP gained the White House in 2001.

During his five years at the helm of the nation’s budget, the president has expanded a wide array of “compassionate” welfare-state, defense, and nondefense programs. When it comes to spending, Bush is no Reagan. Alas, he is also no Clinton and not even Nixon. The recent president he most resembles is in fact fellow Texan and legendary spendthrift Lyndon Baines Johnson—except that Bush is in many ways even more profligate with the public till.

These massive spending increases are entirely independent of any 9/11-related or defense-based expenditures: “When homeland security spending is separated out, the increase in discretionary spending is still huge: 36 percent on Bush’s watch.” During the Bush presidency, total real discretionary outlays increased by 35.8 percent. By comparison, the same figure increased by only 11.2 percent during the deficit-plagued Reagan administration, and during the budget-balancing Clinton administration, it
decreased by 8.2 percent.
All of this led the AEI report to conclude:
“It seems incontestable that we should conclude that the country’s purse is worse off when Republicans are in power.”

Compare that profligate, deficit-spawning behavior to the pretty words of Ronald Reagan at the 1980 RNC Convention:

The head of a government which has utterly refused to live within its means and which has, in the last few days, told us that this year’s deficit will be $60 billion, dares to point the finger of blame at business and labor, both of which have been engaged in a losing struggle just trying to stay even…. [I]t is time for our government to go on a diet.

And in his 1984 convention speech, Reagan mocked the Democrats’ propensity to spend into deficits and scoffed, “About a decade ago, they said federal spending was out of control, so they passed a budget-control act and, in the next five years, ran up deficits of $260 billion. Some control.” Yet the same party that claims to revere Reagan and be guided by his principles of fiscal restraint converted Bill Clinton’s multibillion-dollar surplus into a multibillion-dollar deficit almost overnight.

While the GOP runs time and again on a platform of limited government, its leaders seek to extend the tentacles of government into virtually every area of Americans’ lives. This was the promise made by Ronald Reagan in 1980: “I pledge to restore to the federal government the capacity to do the people’s work without dominating their lives.” Yet the reality of the Republican Party has been precisely the opposite.

With the bulk of the nation’s political attention devoted to the Bush administration’s radical terrorism and war policies, the relentless domestic invasions into the private realm of adult Americans usually go unnoticed. But underneath the media radar, the administration and its right-wing congressional allies have been actively placating the religious conservative wing of the Republican Party through all sorts of liberty-infringing and highly invasive measures. On every level, it is difficult to envision a political party more hostile to individual liberty than the current Bush-led Republicans.

One of the leading items on the agenda of religious conservatives is their desire to prevent adult citizens who want to gamble from doing so—not by persuading them of the evils of gambling, but by abusing the power of the federal government and making it a criminal offense for those adults to choose to gamble. In 2006, congressional Republicans, led by senators Bill Frist and John Kyl, attached a broad anti-gambling provision onto a bill designed to
enhance port security,
which meant that nobody could vote against it.

That provision “prohibit[s] gamblers [i.e., adults] from using credit cards, checks and electronic fund transfers to settle their online wagers,” and it also dramatically enhances the enforcement powers of the federal government to arrest and imprison adults who choose to spend the money they earn by sitting in their homes and gambling online.

As reflected by the observations at
National Review
’s Corner of Andrew Stuttaford (one of the few remaining conservative genuine believers in individual liberty), Republicans have now almost completely abandoned any belief in limitations on the power and reach of the federal government to regulate every aspect of our lives, while Democrats, imperfect though they are, have taken the role of insisting upon the right of citizens to be free from unwarranted federal government intervention. Here is Stuttaford, quoting Democratic representative Barney Frank:

[Frank]: “If an adult in this country, with his or her own money, wants to engage in an activity that harms no one, how dare we prohibit it because it doesn’t add to the GDP or it has no macroeconomic benefit. Are we all to take home calculators and, until we have satisfied the gentleman from Iowa that we are being socially useful, we abstain from recreational activities that we choose?…

“People have said, What is the value of gambling? Here is the value. Some human beings enjoy doing it. Shouldn’t that be our principle? If individuals like doing something and they harm no one, we will allow them to do it, even if other people disapprove of what they do.”

[Stuttaford]: Barney Frank talking sense, Senator Frist not. Draw your own conclusions.

Barney Frank is typically held up (for less than noble reasons) as the face of contemporary big-government liberalism, yet Frank’s formulation here—“If individuals like doing something and they harm no one, we will allow them to do it, even if other people disapprove of what they do”—is an expression of the core, defining
limited-government
principle, which previously defined (at least ostensibly) small-government conservative ideology. Those principles are ones that the Republican Party, under power-crazed authoritarians like Bill Frist, not only clearly reject but have actively worked to undermine in virtually every realm.

The Bush administration and its GOP congressional allies have been waging a similar war against the evils of adult pornography. The Mark Foley–sponsored “Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006” has as one of its principal, hidden purposes the imposition of a regulatory scheme designed to make it as prohibitively expensive and burdensome as possible to produce and distribute adult pornographic products or to maintain adult websites.

The First Amendment bars them from doing what they really want to do, which is criminalize the production and distribution of any material they consider to be pornographic (just as they have criminalized gambling). As a result, they are attempting to accomplish the same objective via the indirect strategy of imposing so many record-keeping and other bureaucratic requirements on companies that produce pornography—compliance is virtually impossible without hiring attorneys and new employees strictly to work on record keeping—that companies can no longer afford to do so and are scared out of operating or are driven out of business.

During the Senate confirmation hearings of Michael Mukasey as attorney general, longtime GOP senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, in questioning Mukasey, made clear that when it comes to policies of the Justice Department, his primary concern is that the DOJ is not doing enough to battle the evils of what even he calls
“mainstream, adult pornography.”