The year of spending dangerously
Rep. Jeff Flake, R-AZ

Thraipsing down a flower-strewn path unpricked by the thorns of reason. Perhaps no adage more accurately describes Congress now. In the midst of a national debate on how to pay for rebuilding hurricane-ravaged communities, it has blithely authorized $2 billion for H.R. 250, "A bill to establish an interagency committee to coordinate federal manufacturing research."

There is virtue in getting back to "business as usual" after a tragedy if it is a business you ought to be in. But lavish spending on questionable programs should have been out of step with Republican principles before these two hurricanes struck. From any vantage point outside the Washington Beltway, it now looks even more out of place.

A party gone astray
How did we get here? Is this the same party that just 10 years ago insisted on dollar-for-dollar spending offsets for its $15 billion response to the Northridge, Calif., earthquake -- with the California Republican delegation leading the charge? Where did we go wrong? And how do we convince the voters in the midterm elections that two more years of Republican control will produce anything more than bigger government and growing deficits?

Is it enough to reflect on the halcyon days when we delivered an impressive package of tax cuts? "What have you done for us lately?" the voters might ask. Simple: We have spent so profligately since 9/11 that it is becoming politically difficult to fully implement those cuts.

When we refuse to postpone a prescription drug benefit we could ill afford prior to the devastation, and reject a national consensus that we reopen the infamous Highway Bill and finance the rebuilding of the bridge over Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana by cancelling the Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska, we can hardly blame voters for questioning our fiscal bona fides.

In the end, it probably won't matter much at the polls. Owing to the limited number of competitive seats nationwide, a shift large enough to jeopardize the Republican majority is unlikely. Furthermore, endemic Democratic ineptitude makes Republicans more attractive when graded on a curve. This may explain the GOP's reluctance to assume its limited-government mantle.

Untenable precedents
But there is much more at stake here than ballot victory or defeat. In the ashes of 9/11, we set a dangerous precedent that any victim of a terrorist act would be made whole by the federal government. In the wake of Katrina/Rita, we risk setting an even more unsustainable precedent that it is the responsibility of the federal government to ensure victims of natural disasters are made whole as well.

After the next tornado in Kansas or wildfire in Arizona, these communities will assert similar claims on the Treasury, and a compassionate Congress will have no right to ignore them. And then?

Whether we want to admit it or not, the Republican Congress's failure to discipline itself is sending us all down a flower-strewn path to financial insolvency. That the Democrats would get us there faster should be of little consolation to anyone.

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C'mon, Jeff, just leave the party. I know you want to.

Both parties have been crazily spending since the 1950s. Ridiculous.

Doesn't make it anymore right that both parties have been doing it. It's just makes it more obvious how corrupt our two party system is.

I don't know what you inferred from my statement, but I agree with your response anyway.

*looks at your sig*

The Heritage Foundation is releasing a study on GOP spending this week, the results are...disturbing.

...details forthcoming.

*Cato

http://www.cato.org/pubs/tbb/tbb-0510-26.pdf

That's some interesting stuff. Two questions:

1) Do those statistics account for inflation?
2) How much of it is Bush's spending, and how much of it is the GOP congress' spending?

Either way, it gets passed by both sides. So far as I'm concerned they've both granted each other an open book of blank checks.

1) Doesn't matter, we're talking about percentage increases over the previous year (or years).

2) Congress spends the money of course, Bush hasn't vetoed a single bill though. Turns out a republican president and congress has been a bad combination(as far as runaway spending goes).

Fair enough on point (2), but I'll have to disagree that inflation doesn't matter. If spending goes up 8%, and inflation goes up 10%, there is an effective decrease in spending. So we do need to know what the inflation rate is in order to make that statistic somewhat informative.