Fox News political analyst Brit Hume conceded that Republicans that grew the federal government while they were in power the last decade may have ultimately been responsible for the recent standoff over the budget because their actions helped create the Tea Party that now stands fiercely opposed to their goals.
On Monday’s Special Report with Bret Baier on Fox News, Hume lamented that “veteran political observers on both the left and right are still trying to figure out what the House Tea Party caucus” and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) were thinking “when they insisted on using the threat of a government shutdown to defund ObamaCare.”
Hume, along with those like Charles Krauthammer and George Will in the veteran punditocracy, has fiercely criticized Cruz during the fight to defund Obamacare. And he acknowledged that though “in conventional terms, it seems inexplicable,” Cruz “and his adherents do not view things in conventional terms.”
“They look back over the past half-century, including the supposedly golden era of Ronald Reagan, and see the uninterrupted forward march of the American left,” Hume said, without acknowledging that Reagan fought the establishment from the time he endorsed Barry Goldwater’s candidacy for president in 1964 and challenged the establishment in 1976 and 1980, ultimately triumphing.
That is the fight those like Cruz, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin are continuing today.
“Entitlement spending never stopped growing,” Hume said. “The regulatory state continued to expand. The national debt grew and grew and finally in the Obama years, exploded. They see an American population becoming unrecognizable from the free and self-reliant people they thought they knew.”
Hume then acknowledged that the “good guys” in Congress Palin said was already leading a third-party movement “see the Republican Party as having utterly failed to stop the drift toward an unfree nation supervised by an overweening and bloated bureaucracy.”
“They are not interested in Republican policies that merely slow the growth of this leviathan,” Hume said. “They want to stop it and reverse it. And they want to show their supporters they’ll try anything to bring that about.”
Those who support Cruz also do not want to see a GOP that simply manages the decline of America and revolted against the crony capitalistic domestic programs of President George W. Bush’s administration and the Republican Congress in the 2000s in which many so-called conservatives came to Washington to change it and got changed by it. Or, as those like Palin and the Government Accountability Institute’s Peter Schweizer have said, they saw Washington’s cesspool as a big jacuzzi.
The explosion of Washington, D.C. as the country’s “Boomtown” started when Republicans saw that they could cement their status in Washington’s permanent political class by expanding the size and scope of the federal government and extract wealth from Americans to enrich their political cronies, as Schweizer has argued. That resulted in policies like No Child Left Behind and TARP that the conservative base detested and those in the Tea Party grassroots have vowed not to allow to happen again.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.