If you’re a limited government conservative and you want to stay informed, you really ought to be reading Jon Henke and company over at Q and O. I met Jon at Samsphere in Chicago: he has a wealth of blogging experience, key insights into strategic roles of new media, and a realistic, no-holds-barred view of the political landscape.
Today, following off a Robert Novak column, he makes a point about the chronic, compulsive inability of many Congressional Republicans to get their act together on spending and fiscal issues, a point that is difficult to refute:
Reelecting these guys is like sending Norm Peterson to lead an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. They’re whipped by Democrats and by the public choice incentives. There’s just no significant ambition to limit government. More importantly, they have no ideas for how to limit the size of government.
To some extent, that’s a failure of the existing Republican leadership. But it’s more of a failure of the larger Limited Government movement that has been captured by Washington, DC. We’ve developed an entrenched bureaucracy devoted more to sustaining and propagating itself than to actually limiting government.
First, many of the GOP members of Congress need to admit they have a problem. Second, members of the Limited Government movement need to decide to stop enabling them. (And not necessarily in that order….)
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