It was yet another embarrassing spectacle of Republicans
squabbling over who was for big government first. Jim Talent, a
former senator from Missouri acting as a surrogate for Mitt Romney,
took Rick Santorum to task for voting for Medicare Part D while in
the Senate in 2003.
Medicare Part D was indeed an egregious example of federal
government growth. It added at least $7 trillion to the already
substantial unfunded liabilities of the Medicare system. The
deficit-financed prescription drug benefit was also the biggest new
entitlement program since the Great Society. On a media conference
call, Talent described it as a “big expansion of a federal
entitlement.”
According to reporters who were on the call, Talent went so far
as to say Santorum’s Medicare Part D vote placed him in the
“liberal wing of the Republican Party” on fiscal issues. There was
just one problem: Talent also voted for Medicare Part D. Talent
later
told the Weekly Standard’s Michael Warren that the
senators’ Bush-era Medicare votes could “be explained or justified”
and that Romneycare was “on balance, a conservative measure” that
had the Heritage Foundation’s backing at the time.
The moral of this story: Republicans generally do a very good
job of promoting fiscal conservatism when the Democrats are in
power. Yet when they control the White House and Congress,
Republicans have a tendency to lose their way. They are the party
of the Paul Ryan budget under Barack Obama but the party of
Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, and Romneycare under GOP
chief executives.
Whatever happens in the presidential election, someone will need
to resist big spending whether it comes from liberal Democrats or
leap-year conservatives. One candidate who recognizes this need is
Ted Cruz, who is running for the Republican nomination to replace
retiring Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison in Texas. Cruz told this writer
that having the right party label isn’t good enough.
“Texas is too Republican a state to settle for anything less
than a conservative leader,” Cruz says. Even casting the right
votes and getting high ratings from conservative groups isn’t as
important as rocking the boat. Cruz argues that the solution is
electing a critical mass of committed constitutional
conservatives.
Cruz identifies Jim DeMint, Rand Paul, and Mike Lee as examples
of what he is talking about (he notes that all three senators have
endorsed him in his primary). He also points to Marco Rubio and Pat
Toomey, suggesting that the generation of conservatives who came of
age in the Reagan years are ready to make their mark on the
party.
When Cruz first jumped into the race for Senate, admirers
immediately predicted an epic Tea Party against the GOP
establishment battle like Rubio versus Charlie Crist in Florida or
Paul versus Trey Grayson in Kentucky. But for a while, the
conservative vote was splintered among several candidates (the most
important competitor on the right was Michael
Williams) and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurt seemed like a strong
frontrunner.
Gradually, Cruz consolidated conservative support. He has the
backing of FreedomWorks, the Club for Growth, Redstate.com’s Erick
Erickson, and the radio talk show host Mark Levin. George Will, the
dean of Washington conservative columnists,
opined that for “conservatives seeking reinforcements for
Washington’s too-limited number of limited-government
constitutionalists, it can hardly get better than” Cruz.
A graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law (magna cum laude), Cruz
displays legal interests quite uncharacteristic of the Ivy League:
he believes it is important to limit the federal government to its
constitutionally enumerated powers, as the Ninth and Tenth
Amendments make clear. The former Texas solicitor general has tried
to put these principles into action.
Cruz understands that fighting for limited government will
sometimes entail fighting other Republicans. He has assailed
Dewhurst’s proposal for a Texas wage tax on businesses as a thinly
veiled personal income tax. He’s under no illusion that Americans
are likely to elect 51 constitutionalist senators, but says a dozen
or so working within the Republican caucus could do a world of
good.
The ideological composition of the Senate Republican conference
will be determined by primary races in states like Texas, Indiana,
and Utah. But in some segments of the party, there has been
movement away from the idea that individual mandates and
deficit-funded government programs are only bad when instituted by
Democrats.
Looking at the GOP presidential candidates and their surrogates,
many conservatives undoubtedly feel such a changing of the guard
couldn’t come too soon.
