All of a sudden, the Republicans are deficit hawks?

Posted by Deuce Geary on January 28th, 2009

Before you click on that link, see if you can guess whether the quote refers to (a) the number of Republicans that voted for the “stimulus” package that passed the House today; or (b) the credibility that Republican congressmen have on the issue of fiscal discipline.

The writer meant (a), but I think it’s both.

There’s lots of backpatting going on over the fact that not a single Republican voted for the “stimulus” bill that passed in the house today. Excuse me if I don’t join the patters.

OK, maybe its not actually backpatting at HotAir, Ace, and Michelle Malkin. Maybe it’s just relief that no Republican votes can be connected to the results of the bill.

Still, the whole thing rankles me. I think John McCormack at The Weekly Standard blog gets it just right:

A party line vote on a pork-laden trillion dollar spending bill–now that’s change you can believe in.

The obvious point is that this shouldn’t be a change, it should have been the case all along. I won’t blame a single leftie who criticizes the Republicans for starting to care about excess spending only once Obama got into office.

Granted, this is a huge amount of spending in a single bill, and thus different than the deficits the Republicans gave us in smaller chunks. But the Republicans have shown by their actions the last eight years that they have zero credibility on spending discipline.

Hell, they can oppose every single bit of excess spending for the next four years, and I still wouldn’t trust them to maintain that “discipline” once a Republican president is elected again. It might take eight years of an Obama administration before I would even begin to believe it.

Anyway, the bill moves to the Senate, and if you’ve got your hopes set on a filibuster . . . Five Thirty Eight advises you think again.

UPDATE: I am not alone in my skepticism of the Republicans’ spending discipline. In this HotAir poll (scroll to the bottom of the linked post) 51% expected 25 or more House Republicans to vote in favor.

UPDATE #2: NeoLibertarian at Large gets it. Unlike me, he offers this important diclaimer — which shouldn’t be necessary:

[T]here are a minority of Republicans who stood up and were against Bush’s TARP and other crazy spending bills. I don’t mean to include them in my criticism.