The latest attempt from TIME to highlight Republican hypocrisy involves an article on GOP presidential candidates who preach fiscal responsibility today after clamoring for federal cash during their tenures as governors or congressional representatives.
While potentially disheartening to conservatives, the article also highlights the important role the Tea Party and other activist groups have played in drawing attention to federal bloat.
The calls encouraging this growth were bipartisan and ubiquitous, emanating from the states and their congressional delegations. From 2000 to ’09, federal aid to state and local governments rose 89%, to $552 billion, 16% of the U.S. budget. But the debt boom in recent years, combined with the rise of the grass-roots Tea Party movement, has turned deficit spending into political kryptonite. “The piece of the puzzle that was missing was that there was no one sitting at the table whose No. 1 issue was the size of government,” says Grover Norquist, a Republican antitax activist in Washington. “They never showed up. They didn’t have mailing lists. Now they do.”
So the 2012 candidates all promise big spending cuts, even as they try to justify their past attempts to dip into the federal cookie jar. It’s the sort of dance required of most officeholders as they move up the political stepladder. The governors say they had a responsibility to reclaim as much of their constituents’ federal taxes as possible to handle problems that were federal responsibilities. Bachmann and Paul argue that they needed to make sure the money that was spent was not wasted. But not everyone is willing to give them a pass. “The next President is going to be facing an epic fiscal mess,” says Tad DeHaven, a state-budget analyst at the Cato Institute. “And we really can’t afford another politician who talks the talk but really doesn’t walk the walk.”
This discussion brings to mind Stephen Hayes’ comments about the Tea Party during his John Locke Foundation Headliner appearance earlier this year.
