Marco Rubio’s Imaginary Republican Party Is Fiscally Conservative
Speaking on Saturday at a dinner for South Carolina Republicans, Florida Senator Marco Rubio urged his fellow partisans to be team players. “As frustrated as sometimes we may get with the leadership of our own party on one issue or another, the logical home of the limited government, constitutional republican principles of our nation is the Republican Party. The logical home for the defense of the free-enterprise system is the Republican Party,” he told them. “It is the only organization in modern American politics that is still capable at this moment of driving forward these concepts and these principles that are so important for our future and require us to unite behind it with a sense of purpose and focus unlike any we have had in our lifetimes.”
I wish it were true. But it’s illogical to think that Republicans will govern as limited-government constitutionalists if they return to power. Neither of the two major parties will pursue that agenda. The Democrats are perpetually looking to expand and perfect the New Deal. The GOP alternates between railing against entitlements when out of power and expanding them once a president from the party is running things. And both parties have used the War on Terrorism to abandon any pretense of an executive branch limited by the Constitution. The choices they’re offering in the presidential contest are as depressing. Voters can cast their ballot for an incumbent who has taken many positions he once described as abhorrent, or a challenger who describes as abhorrent many of the positions he once took himself.
Rep. Paul Ryan has taken the lead in offering a Republican alternative to President Obama’s spending proposals. His budget is the outer limit of what Republicans dare to propose, which is to say, it’s wildly unrealistic to imagine it passing unaltered. Even so, Ryan refuses to specify which tax deductions it would eliminate, though they’re vital to his deficit projections; his budget increases military spending, a category of expenditure that causes many Republicans to stop caring about deficits; and the budget’s Medicare savings don’t even start accruing for another 10 years.