The great irony of GOP control







America would be better off if Al Gore had been elected president in 2000.
So would Republicans. If that sounds insane to you, it's probably because
you belong to the Republican tribe.

Or maybe it's because you're too blinded by your own economic or moral
self-interest to notice or care that most Republicans today adore and abuse
the powers and perks of Big Government as much as Democrats do.

I'm not pretending there are no important differences between R's and D's.
Or that Weird Al would have done a better job of fighting terrorism before
or after 9/11 than George W. Bush did.

But when Democrats run the White House, America gets something good -
federal gridlock. For partisan and ideological reasons, Republicans in
Congress often can scare off, fix, block or kill a Democrat administration's
stupidest, most expensive projects. Hillary Clinton health-care reform is
the best example.

But when a Republican controls the presidency, Republicans in Congress start
thinking and acting like liberal Democrats -- and suddenly no opposition
party exists to challenge the Big Government crowd, which dominates both
parties.

I don't care which party does the parliamentary maneuvering, as long as the
ever-growing size, scope, reach and intrusiveness of the federal government
is stymied or - and I joke -- actually reversed.

But so far, the all-Republican regime in Washington has been a disaster for
the dwindling remnant of Americans who still really believes in freedom and
limited government.

Would we be in Iraq today if Gore had been elected president? Would the USA
Patriot Act be so dangerous to civil liberties if it had been subjected to
unfriendly Republican congressional scrutiny?

We wouldn't have gotten a tax cut under Gore. But would our budget deficit
be $500 billion? Would federal spending be up by double-digits since 2000?
Would we have gotten that $400 bazillion Medicare prescription drug deal?

To get an insider's answer to these rhetorical questions, I called my
favorite congressman, Rep. Ron Paul, a former Pittsburgher transplanted to
Houston, Tex.

Paul, arguably the last truly principled Republican left in Congress,
religiously votes for the things most of his fellow Republicans pretend to
be for until they gain power - personal liberty, fiscal integrity and
Constitutional government.

If Gore were president, Paul said, "We probably would have ended up with the
same kind of mess that we have now."

But at least then Republicans -- especially the "principled conservatives"
Paul says have lost influence in Bush's center-left regime -- could have
blamed liberal big-spenders for the mess.

Now, Paul said, conservatives have nobody else "to blame, because most
people think that conservatives are in charge. But actually the
conservatives are not in charge. The conservatives have been neutralized."

This is nothing new. For 40 years, lots of Republicans got elected by
promising to tame and dismember the federal leviathan.

Remember those brave threats by arch-conservatives to kill the Education and
Energy departments and privatize the Post Office and Social Security?
Remember the glorious Gingrichian Revolution of '94?

They were just jokes - or Republican lies. Big Government, GOP-style, is
bigger and badder than ever.

The great irony is that the only significant reversal of the welfare state
since it was invented - the 1996 reform of welfare -- occurred while a
Democrat held the White House and Republicans ran Congress.