Posted by
Always To The Right on Friday, November 07, 2008 4:59:33 PM
Dick Armey writes in a Wall Street Journal column
today what most conservatives understood for the past several years —
that “compassionate conservatism” was just another name for Big
Government. The former Majority Leader under Speaker Newt Gingrich
traces the fall of the GOP to the beginning of the Bush administration
and its spending policies
Newt Gingrich sounds a similar tone in this interview with a George Washington grad student, especially at the end
However, in the midst of the Bush-bashing, I want to point out
something Gingrich says. He states that as long as the government
spends multi-trillion dollars every year, lobbyists will gather to get
their share, distorting the political process and leading to
corruption. The only way to reduce or eliminate the influence of
lobbyists in Washington is to reduce the amount of spoils they can grab.
Gingrich is right, and so is Armey, as far as they go. That process
also works in reverse, though, something both Armey and Gingrich
neglect to mention. Armey does some measure of self-congratulation in
noting the roles of himself, Gingrich, and John Boehner in opposing the
“old bulls” of the party in 1994 and winning with the Contract with
America. What neither Armey nor Gingrich mention is the parallel “K
Street Project” that Republicans launched to get lobbyists harnessed to
the Republican Party. In order to do that, they needed to guarantee
spoils to these lobbyists, which meant more money spent at the federal
level and an explosion in earmark spending.
We can certainly criticize the Bush administration for its
high-spending ways, but let’s not kid ourselves that the Republican
problems started with W’s inauguration. The seeds of the spending
explosion got planted in that K Street Project, and that signaled the
end of small-government conservatism in that era. Gingrich is right in
that we need to cut spending in order to minimize the influence of
lobbyists, but we can’t trust any party to do that when they’re busily
bribing lobbyists in order to support a supposedly “permanent
majority”. Republicans forgot why they wanted that power, and got seduced by it instead, and well before Bush took office.