Republicans do it Bigger, Better

An article in today's Washington Post explains how under Bush, the federal government has actually grown in size and influence.

In a clear break from Republican campaigns of the 1990s to downsize government and devolve power to the states, Bush is fostering what amounts to an era of new federalism in which the national government shapes, not shrinks, programs and institutions to comport with various conservative ideals, according to Republicans inside and outside the White House.

Fancy that. For all their talk, give Republicans a chance to be in power and suddenly their main goal, limiting the power of the federal government, vanishes into ideological obscurity. To be fair, some Republicans with integrity don't support this:

Pence, an influential leader of House conservatives, said 50 Republicans gathered in Baltimore this past week and discussed, among other things, an overwhelming desire to protest the expansion of government by opposing Bush's education plan for high school students. While only 33 House Republicans opposed the No Child Left Behind law in the first term, Pence predicted that a significantly larger number will vote against expanding the program to cover high schools. Michael Franc of the Heritage Foundation, a pro-Bush think tank, agreed. "It's a non-starter" in the minds of a large number of Republicans, he said.

I'm not a libertarian or a conservative, and to be fair I don't believe that government should be drastically rolled back in any way shape or form. But I do believe there are certain problems that only the federal government should deal with, and many others that should be left to the states, and that above all the federal government should not drive the nation into crushing debt to accomplish even the most worthy of goals. It's just fun to pick on the GOP, which promised only 10 years ago that they would "revive" the 10th Amendment and give more power and responsibility back to the states. Clearly what we have simply is a shift in what the federal government will regulate; more freedom from restraint for corporations and business, less taxation for the wealthiest among us, but more regulations on schools and morality, and an effort to impose a new Social Security plan on us. Some of us suspect that this was the plan all along from people like Norquist; after all the precipitous ruin of our economy by debt will teach us a lesson about the wrongness of larger government that moderately decreasing expenses probably would not. And what does he care? He's got his tax refunds safely invested in the Caymen Islands.

Next time you happen to chat with a conservative, remind them a vote for Bush was a vote against one of their most sacred tenents, and ask them what their excuse is.