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"The general approach for Republicans for several years now has been to talk about cutting spending at every opportunity while consistently voting in favor of spending increases," said Stephen Slivinski, director of budget studies at the Cato Institute. "If they really want to rein in spending now, they can do it. They have better margins and a strong showing in the recent election. There are no more excuses."

"This is a fight for the soul of the Republican Party," Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan said. "The moral authority of fiscal conservatism is only valid if we practice what we preach." Ryan looks like a conservative Mr. Smith going to Washington. Outraged by what he sees happening in D.C., Ryan makes little attempt in conversation to mask his distaste for the whole scene. With little prompting, Ryan recounts with a sort of jilted awe how many of his own colleagues pressured him to vote for the $300 billion-plus omnibus spending bill last November. "This 3,000 page monster lands on my desk about six hours before the vote," Ryan said. "There wasn't time but to leaf through it. And what little bit I actually had a chance to read, I sure didn't like." He voted against it. It passed anyway, 344 to 51.

TRADITIONALLY, SUPPLY-SIDERS have been reluctant to cede too much ground to "green-eyeshade" Republicanism, which they believe focuses too much on cutting deficits and not enough on clearing the boards to let the inherent dynamism of the American economy play itself out. Deficit worries are also often accompanied by calls for higher taxes rather than lower spending. Supply-siders cite the trade and budget deficits under Reagan, pointing out that the sky not fall in the 1980s and massive growth occurred.

Still, the most public faces of the supply-side movement accept some sort of deficit reduction plan. In his latest otherwise laudatory book, Bullish on Bush, the Club for Growth's Stephen Moore calls the current budget deficits "inexcusable," and jabs sharply that Republicans "no longer have a credible anti-big government agenda." Moore also quotes the libertarian Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman declaring the budget deficit "the single greatest deterrent to faster economic growth in the United States today."

"We have a budget process that works as well as a pub that opens its doors to a pack of fraternity brothers and tells them the drinks are on the house," Moore writes.

Most conservatives see the current spending outrages as a problem of collusion between moderate Republicans and liberal Democrats. Such dereliction of duty by wide swaths of the Republican Party has convinced Pence, Ryan, and others that the conservative mandate of election 2004 should apply to reforming the system broadly, not just to quibbling over one bill or another. Whether talking about tax reform, budget reform, or Social Security reform, the central theme amongst them is "fundamental change."

"When it comes to spending, it's not bad people," Pence said. "It's bad process. If anyone believes we can restrain federal spending without fundamentally altering procedure, well, frankly, that is just not going to happen."

It is an article of faith among House conservatives that entitlements must be reformed in order to save them and that the best method of combating out-of-control federal spending is first to change how the government works on the budget. Rep. Ryan has authored, along with fellow conservative Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling, the Budget Fraud Elimination Act, which seeks to overturn much of the Budget Act of 1974, a bill passed by a Democratic majority and signed by a hamstrung Richard Nixon, grasping at liberal straws in the final month before his resignation. The act ushered in the era of massive, pork-filled omnibus spending bills, even larger deficit spending, and general unaccountability.

The federal budget today is passed as a resolution, a mere set of guidelines for spending that can be easily ignored. Ryan's bill would give the federal budget the force of law, and any "budget busting" requests would require approval by a two-thirds majority. It would also close the grossly misused "emergency spending" loophole and send any savings from spending cuts back to the U.S. Treasury instead of back to the Appropriations Committee, where it currently goes to be re-spent.

"Right now you can find the most egregious boondoggle in a bill and eliminate it, but you can't save that money," Ryan said. "It goes back into the pork pot to be spent somewhere else. Nothing is accrued to savings. The money is spent at all costs."

This is not, however, the first time congressional budget restraint measures have been employed. The Gramm-Rudman bill, for example, was enacted in 1985 to reduce the $200 billion budget deficit. (Ironically, President Bush is now promising to cut the record 2004 deficit of $417 billion in half by the time he leaves office in 2008 -- in other words, cut it down to roughly 1985 crisis levels. The U.S. budget deficit for last November alone was almost $58 billon.) Gramm-Rudman required automatic spending cuts if Congress exceeded spending caps. Accordingly, the deficit fell from 6 to 3 percent of GDP, government spending dropped from an annual growth rate of 8.7 percent to 3.2 percent, and entitlement spending slowed to a rate of 5 percent. As further proof of its effectiveness, unions, tax-and-spend liberals, and all the other usual suspects were furious.

The good news was that by 1990, when the law was repealed, the deficit had been cut by 40 percent. The bad news was that Congress had decided they couldn't live by such rules, a fact that does not bode particularly well for the current crop of reformers.

Fiscal conservatives disappointed with the results of the last four years should know that time hasn't been entirely wasted, Ryan said. "This isn't a one-year or a two-year fight," he noted. "We've been on the move for a while. You have to lay groundwork for any transformational legislation." Losing a battle, he said, is sometimes necessary to advance an issue. Ryan and his supporters brought the Budget Fraud Elimination Act forward last summer and lost. They knew they were going to lose, but they wanted to get politicians on the record against fiscal common sense before the election.

"We brought forward the most comprehensive version of budget reform I've ever seen, broke it into 11 distinct policies, and made members vote on each section," Ryan said. "Our suggestions might sound like common sense to people outside of D.C., but there are representatives who consistently vote against this stuff. It's stunning."

DICK ARMEY, WHO FOUGHT similar battles in those same trenches, is skeptical about Republicans betting so much on procedural reform. "Policy reform is a lot easier than process reform," he said. "Policy is about real people in the real world, and it's much easier to explain to constituents. Congress is an unreality, a world carefully constructed to protect the interests of its members. Getting a majority of members to go along with rule changes that will make their life harder will be tough, especially since it will mean defying the appropriators to some degree. They've got idealism on one side, and the appropriators have got dollar bills on the other. That's a tough fight."

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Taxes, Education, Trade, Bill Clinton, Federal Budget, Entitlements, Social Security, Books, Law, Founding Fathers, Iraq, NATO, Conservatism, Unions