Takeover (22 page)

When we strip away defense, homeland security, and entitlements, and adjust for inflation, leaving only discretionary domestic spending, George W. Bush grew the federal government at a faster pace than Lyndon Baines Johnson. Only another Big Government Republican, Richard Nixon, outmatched his record for profligate spending. And when Bush’s second term was over, Bush held the
record as the president who had grown the federal government at its fastest pace in modern times.
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Unlike Bush, father or son, Ronald Reagan actually cut discretionary domestic spending in inflation-adjusted dollars. He was the only president to do so since the end of World War II.

That’s because he didn’t follow Lyndon Johnson’s so-called guns-and-butter formulation of high spending on both military and domestic programs. Reagan knew he had to increase defense spending in order to win the Cold War—a mission that really was accomplished—so he insisted on controlling domestic programs to keep the budget on an even keel. Defense spending went up by 19.2 percent, but Reagan cut discretionary nondefense spending.

In cutting back on domestic spending during the Cold War, Reagan was following the path blazed by FDR and Truman during World War II and the Korean War. Roosevelt cut domestic spending by 20 percent between 1942 and 1944, during World War II, even agreeing with Congress to abolish some of his favorite programs, including the Civilian Conservation Corps, the National Youth Administration, and the Works Projects Administration. And after the start of the Korean War, Truman and his Democratic Congress cut domestic spending by 28 percent in the first year.

Not so George W. Bush. He followed in LBJ’s guns-and-butter footsteps.

Reagan’s accomplishment is all the more remarkable given the fact that the House of Representatives—where spending bills originate—was under Democratic control during both of his terms, at one point by more than one hundred seats. And Bush’s cave-in is all the more inexcusable given the GOP’s control of Congress during most of his two terms.

While spending is the most easily quantified aspect of the corrupt—if tacit—bargain between President George W. Bush and Capitol Hill’s big-spending, Big Government establishment Republicans, this shameful insider deal had many other policy effects—and
none of them good for the conservative cause, the Republican Party, or America.

In politics there are two types of theft. One is illegal theft, which we all too often read about in the media. Usually it is small potatoes—Congressmen Duke Cunningham, Bill Jefferson, Jesse Jackson Jr.; their thefts were unfortunate, but they were caught and punished, and the magnitude of their thefts did not affect the quality of life for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren.

In 1849, French philosopher Claude Frédéric Bastiat identified another kind of theft—legal plunder. Legal plunder, or legal theft, is when politicians use taxpayer money to bribe voters with benefits, bailouts, roads, and bridges for the corrupt and immoral purpose of getting reelected.

Legal theft has cost trillions of dollars; it affects our quality of life for generations, and indeed threatens the very future of our country.

Both parties engage in this legal theft. I sometimes fanaticize about a fictitious meeting early in 2001 at the Bush White House to strategize how Republicans could hold power for generations to come. Instead of standing for conservative principles, someone says, “I’ve got an idea! How about bribery? Let’s bribe the voters to vote for us.” And so they used legal theft to bribe seniors with a new prescription drug benefit. Florida, which Bush won by only 537 votes, was soon awash in federal largesse, paid for by future generations of Americans, and it flowed wherever it was needed to shore up the political prospects of George W. Bush and his allies in Congress.

Due to the 9/11 attacks, and the reflected glow of the outstanding performance of the United States military and intelligence personnel in overthrowing the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, George W. Bush had received a pass from many grassroots conservatives for his betrayals of conservative principles during his first term.

However, by the time Inauguration Day 2005 rolled around, and the urgency of defending Bush against a Democratic opponent had evaporated, conservatives began a hard-nosed assessment of the Bush presidency—and their conclusions weren’t pretty.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had turned into exactly the kind of “nation-building” exercises many grassroots conservatives and libertarians opposed, and that Bush had campaigned against in 1999 and 2000.

“Maybe I’m missing something here,” candidate George W. Bush said in a debate with Democratic rival Al Gore. “I mean, are we going to have some kind of nation-building corps from America? Absolutely not.”
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Almost eight years later, US interagency “provincial reconstruction teams” were trying to rebuild the economy and government in Afghanistan and Iraq. The US Army’s just-revised field manual put military post-conflict “stability operations” on a par with fighting wars, and conservatives and libertarians had concluded that George W. Bush was just another politician who would say anything to get elected.

What’s more, these great sacrifices of blood and treasure were being ineptly and arrogantly managed according to what were obviously political calculations, not sound military principles.

On the domestic policy front, spending was out of control, and while the Bush administration hewed to some conservative principles, in opposition to expanding federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, for example, most of the conservative agenda had long ago been put by the wayside in a rush to expand the federal government’s role in housing, through Bush’s “ownership society” initiative and in education, through the “No Child Left Behind” legislation, and along with a host of other programs that appeared to be straight out of the liberal Democrat’s playbook.

To the extent that there were conservative initiatives, such as Social Security reform, they were quickly abandoned in the face of liberal opposition.

Still, Bush had won reelection—if only narrowly—and conservative leaders were prepared to see George W. Bush’s second term as an opportunity to move the ball down the field, if only by a few yards.

That is, until Bush decided to nominate Harriet Miers, his chief
White House counsel, and longtime Bush family friend, to the United States Supreme Court.

Harriet Miers was a political unknown outside of Texas, where she was seen as a capable and successful business community lawyer.

Her views on the key social issues that concerned conservatives, such as religion in the public square, abortion, and same-sex marriage, were unknown.

Conservatives recalled with growing alarm President George H. W. Bush’s nomination of an unknown New Hampshire judge named David Souter, who, once confirmed, became one of the Supreme Court’s most reliably liberal votes.

Conservative columnists George Will and Charles Krauthammer knocked Miers as an intellectual lightweight, and they were right—there were plenty of other potential nominees who would add conservative intellectual horsepower to the court’s conservative bloc, such as Fourth Circuit Appeals Court judge Michael Luttig, Judge Michael McConnell of the Tenth Circuit, Judge Janice Rogers Brown, and Georgetown University law professor Viet Dinh.

From the conservative perspective, Harriet Miers had absolutely nothing to recommend her as a Supreme Court justice, except a close friendship with the president of the United States and his family.

Just before the announcement, key conservative leaders, such as Dr. James Dobson, “got a personal phone call from Karl Rove,” President Bush’s top political adviser, who assured them that Miers would prove to be a justice “the Religious Right would be mighty pleased with.”

According to published reports, Rove told these conservative leaders, “Harriet Miers is an Evangelical Christian, that she is from a very conservative church, which is almost universally pro-life, that she had taken on the American Bar Association on the issue of abortion and fought for a policy that would not be supportive of abortion, and she had been a member of the Texas Right to Life.”

Some conservative leaders were inclined to accept Rove’s word on the matter, others, such as Gary Bauer, were not.

“If an individual goes his or her whole life,” Bauer wrote, “without
writing or speaking about the horrid court decisions—abortion-on-demand, same-sex ‘marriage,’ removal of public displays of the Ten Commandments—why would they suddenly find their voice when they get on the Supreme Court?”

Bill Kristol, editor of the
Weekly Standard
, waded in to say, Miers “has no constitutional credentials that I know of.” George F. Will said, “There is no evidence that she is among the leading lights of American jurisprudence, or that she possesses the talents commensurate with the Supreme Court’s tasks.”

Washington Post
columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote, “If Miers were not a crony of the president of the United States, her nomination to the Supreme Court would be a joke, as it would have occurred to no one else to nominate her.”

A nominee with such a thin public record invited intense scrutiny, and the media soon discovered that in the late 1980s Miers had donated $1,000 to Al Gore’s failed presidential bid and another $1,000 to the Democratic National Committee.

When further research revealed that Miers told a homosexual rights group that she supported civil rights for homosexuals and said the city of Dallas has a duty to fund AIDS education and “patient support services,” conservatives were outraged.

But when a 1993 speech that Miers delivered to a group called the Executive Women of Dallas surfaced, conservative opposition to Miers solidified. As the
Washington Post
reported, “Miers appeared to offer a libertarian view of several topics in which the law and religious beliefs were colliding in court.” She endorsed “self-determination” on issues such as abortion and school prayer.

Remarked Miers during the speech, “The ongoing debate continues surrounding the attempt to once again criminalize abortions or to once and for all guarantee the freedom of the individual to decide for herself whether she will have an abortion.”

Miers went on to assert, “We gave up … legislating religion or morality.” She added, “When science cannot determine the facts and decisions vary based upon religious belief, then government should not act.”

To conservatives well versed in constitutional law and the language of the Supreme Court, that sounded suspiciously like the language of the Court’s infamous
Roe v. Wade
decision creating a “right” to an abortion.

Miers soon after withdrew her nomination, but the damage was done to President Bush’s reputation with conservatives.

“Republicans first” type conservative leaders who had endorsed Harriet Miers realized that they had been deceived by President Bush and Karl Rove. Those who had opposed Miers, or at least not endorsed her, realized just how close one of the grossest acts of cronyism of the modern American political age had come to putting another David Souter on the Supreme Court.

For most conservatives, the fiasco of the Harriet Miers nomination was the last straw. Bush broke too many promises on reducing the size of the federal government, harnessing federal spending, putting into place permanent tax cuts—not to mention gaining control of runaway immigration policies that had failed.

Like his father before him, Bush seemed content with avoiding ideological battles and surrounding himself with longtime family friends. And, like “Bush 41,” “Bush 43” seemed more willing to avoid bickering with liberals in Congress than to fight for the campaign agenda that got him elected.

While the sound and fury over the Miers nomination played out on the op-ed pages and among the leaders of the conservative movement, who felt their personal credibility had been betrayed by Bush and Rove, the average conservative voter on Main Street wasn’t necessarily invested in the fight the same way.

Unless the Supreme Court issued a big ruling that brought its power home to their neighborhood, it seemed pretty far away.

Sure, they wanted a conservative Supreme Court, but what mattered more to them on a day-to-day basis was what was happening in their own neighborhoods, in their own schools and hospitals, and to their own local taxes.

And one of the most important things that was happening to
those everyday family concerns was (and still is) that illegal immigration is overwhelming America.

Estimates varied as to how many illegal aliens were actually in the United States back during the Bush years. Depending on the source, the numbers range widely—from about seven million up to twenty million or more. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, United States immigration officials have said the number was growing by as much as five hundred thousand a year.
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The Republican National Committee and Republicans in Congress had been alternatively hiding from the illegal immigration issue or promising to increase border security and immigration enforcement for years.

Conservatives, such as Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo, had been warning against the economic and cultural cost of this vast influx of people whose presence in the country was based on the commission of a crime, and who had little or no investment in the social order.

On April 19, 2002, Tancredo gave an interview to the
Washington Times
in which he said Bush’s immigration policies were political calculations designed to snare Hispanic votes in Texas and California and prop up Mexican president Vicente Fox. He said open-border policies left the nation open to terrorist attack.

Tancredo’s remarks invited an angry call from Bush’s White House consigliore Karl Rove on the morning the article was published and a sustained campaign to undermine and marginalize Tancredo afterwards—screaming at him that he would never get inside the White House again.
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