The Self-Sabotage of Small-Government Republicans in Congress

[xchrom]

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/10/the-self-sabotage-of-small-government-republicans-in-congress/280420/



The best distillation I've seen of House Republicans' strategic blunder comes from Daniel Larison of The American Conservative, who appreciates the self-defeating quality of their tactics. "It would be bad enough if small-government Republicans were merely being short-sighted and committed to a losing strategy," he writes, "but what makes these tactics more harmful to the cause of small-government conservatism is that they reflect no sense of prudence or consideration of unintended consequences." As he goes on to explain:

Take the recent claims from many conservatives in Congress that there won’t be a default if the debt ceiling isn’t raised. Even if it were technically possible to prioritize payments in the way that they claim, it would still raise borrowing costs, undermine the dollar, and probably induce a recession, and all the while the size and cost of the government would not have been permanently reduced one bit.

Toying around with default threatens to impose greater costs on American taxpayers rather than reduce them. It is the perfect example of striking a symbolic blow against fiscal irresponsibility while adding to the country’s fiscal problems. If one seriously wants to control and reduce government debt, raising the debt ceiling ought to be the last thing that one worries about, since refusing to raise it simply makes paying off the debt that has already been incurred more expensive. Making useless “stands” of this kind not only make small-government conservative ideas unappealing to many other Americans and provoke backlashes against them, but they make even those that agree with many of those ideas conclude that their representatives are ill-suited to governing.

Just so.

Given the K Street Project, the multi-trillion dollar Iraq debacle, and the general growth in government during the Bush years, I was predisposed to doubt Republicans would ever shrink government. And even though the Tea Party movement has now changed the makeup of the GOP in the House and Senate, I still have no confidence Republicans will ever succeed in shrinking government, because at every step they keep behaving so shortsightedly. It's as if the way for their project to succeed is for them to be maximally intransigent at every moment for fear that if they sketched a strategy involving negotiation, compromise, and incrementalism, members would use it as an excuse to slip into voting for runaway statism at every turn.

[Laelth]

1. k&r for exposure. n/t

-Laelth