Has the GOP ceased to be the party of fiscal conservatism? Republican lawmakers in Washington are worried that it true. But are their concerns little more than hypocritical posturing meant to discredit Trumpism and downplay the issues that Donald Trump’s presidency brought to public awareness?
According to the Hill, “Republicans are having a tough time generating the same outrage over Biden’s multi trillion-dollar spending agenda” because the party’s priorities have shifted away from “belt-tightening” to “culture war issues like immigration, religious freedom, LGBTQ rights, Big Tech and the Black Lives Matter movement.”
The Hill quoted Senate Republican Whip John Thune (S.D.) as bemoaning the current state of the GOP by saying that “unfortunately” fiscal concerns are “probably” not as important to the base as 10 years ago — and that Trump helped realign the party’s priorities.
“It wasn’t something that was an important issue for President Trump, and so many of our base voters align themselves with President Trump. It’s almost like now debt, deficits, spending become abstract issues that a lot of folks aren’t paying attention to and should be,” he said.
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Thune, who is second only to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) among Republicans in the U.S. Senate, went on to argue that while President Trump hit on hot-button issues such as immigration, the GOP must get back to its roots on fiscal issues.
“I’m frankly very concerned about the level of spending and debt, and I think Republicans have got to be the adults in the room and exercise the fiscal responsibility that seems to have been absent, lacking the last several years,” he said.
Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) similarly asked: “Who is the party of fiscal restraint anymore?” Former Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) criticized House conservatives in his new book, On the House: A Washington Memoir, for ostensibly abandoning their Tea Party principles during the Trump years.
“None of these guys said anything when the Trump administration added $1 trillion to the federal budget deficit by the end of 2019 — before a single dime was spent on COVID-19 relief.
“They were rubber stamps for it in Congress. Many of them who raised huge stinks about [the Troubled Asset Relief Program] were only too happy to let Trump bail out farmers hurt by his trade war with China,” Boehner added.
Now, there’s no doubt that Washington’s unbridled spending is placing the country on a direct course to financial crisis. For the $28 trillion national debt can only lead to a crisis.
American Thinker’s Peter Skurkiss points out, “the debt can never be paid back, not by taxes or productivity increases.”
“There is no consensus on what is coming,” Skurkiss continues. “If one listens to independent analysts who are not hacks for the big banks, government, or Wall Street, a conflicting picture emerges. People like Jim Rickards, Doug Casey, and Richard Prechter of the Elliot Wave fame see a major depression coming, while Peter Schiff and others see runaway inflation in America’s future.”
Yet the cries from the Republican establishment wagging a condemning finger at President Trump and his supporters ring hollow.
After all, Republicans prior to Donald Trump have been just as guilty of growing the debt as Democrats. The national debt grew by 168 percent and 101 percent under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush respectively, putting them in the company of Barack Obama and Franklin Roosevelt as the top five presidential contributors to America’s debt.
Moreover, it was the establishment GOP leadership in Congress that failed to peel back high-dollar, Obama-era programs such as Obamacare when it had the chance.
Fiscal conservatism must remain a part of the conversation. It poses an existential threat to America’s well-being. But Republicans’ insistence that the party return to fiscal talk at the expense of “cultural issues” is merely a ploy to get the public to cease fighting on other important issues that likewise pose great threats to the nation.
The Republican establishment doesn’t want us talking about Big Tech’s eradication of free speech. They don’t want us talking about Communist China’s infiltration of every aspect of American society, or about the massive loss of jobs owing to offshoring, or about the disastrous national security and economic implications of the current open-borders policy.
The GOP’s longtime refusal to tackle so-called “cultural issues” is why the left has so greatly advanced the country toward communism over the years. Apparently, the party’s leadership wants to continue the legacy of surrender.
