Comment by ethbr1
9 days ago
There's a much stronger argument that Trump's personality cult in the current GOP legislature is doing the same.
Threatening primaries and social media tirades against his legislative opponents chases any Republican willing to check him out of the party.
I mean, Christ, only 2 fiscal conservative Republicans had an issue with deficit spending greater than what the House had passed? And a debt limit increase?
The real problem with Congressional GOP independence is that enough of them don't decide something is too much at the same time. Ones and twos are easily picked off.
If we're being honest, the GOP never had a problem with deficit spending. It was under Republican administrations that the debt and deficits have grown the most, after all.
It just happens to be a useful cudgel to beat the Democrats over the head anytime they want to spend money, both because the debt really is something that will have to be addressed at some point and because most voters are too stupid (or willfully ignorant) to keep track of which party is really doing all the spending and what said spending has been for.