MCCAIN: GOP LOOKING DOVISH ON DEFICIT SPENDING

by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist

WASHINGTON -On the heels of the pork-packed energy bill and a behemoth Medicare expansion, some prominent conservatives are expressing concerns that the Republican Party may be shedding its famously frugal reputation.

Or, as Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., bluntly said on television, the GOP-controlled Congress has been "spending money like a drunken sailor."

Congressional Republicans loaded the $31 billion energy bill with three times the amount of tax breaks and subsidies that President Bush originally requested. Critics charged the bill was laden with pork - favored projects intended to garner congressional votes more than to improve the nation's energy system. Congress also voted this fall to spend $400 billion to reform Medicare with a prescription drug benefit, creating the largest new entitlement in decades.

It's the kind of big spending Republicans long accused Democrats of engaging in.

"I think we've lost our bearings," McCain said in an interview. "We've lost our sense of outrage and anger over these egregious spending practicesá..

"First you're outraged, then you condone, then you embrace."

A bipartisan coalition that includes Sens. John Sununu and Judd Gregg, both New Hampshire Republicans, in addition to McCain has temporarily frozen the energy bill in the Senate. Opponents mounted a filibuster to prevent it from coming to a vote, partly because it violates spending limits for the next decade that Congress adopted earlier this year.

But according to hardcore deficit hawks such as McCain and former Sen. Warren Rudman, also a New Hampshire Republican, the energy bill is symptomatic of a GOP that has been fiscally careless in recent years.

The numbers tell the story.

Government spending has grown to $2.17 trillion this year, 16-percent higher than it was when Bush took office in January 2001, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Leading Republicans, including the President, have argued that unprecedented homeland security costs, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as burgeoning entitlement payments for Social Security and Medicare have contributed significantly to that jump.

Discretionary spending - money that Congress is not required to spend - has increased 27 percent during the same time period, to an estimated $826 billion. Excluding the military, discretionary spending has increased 22 percent - to $419 billion - since 2001.

By comparison, non-military discretionary spending increased 9.8 percent during the first three years of the Clinton administration, according to the CBO.

All this comes alongside Bush's sweeping $350 billion in tax cuts, which helped turn a $127 billion budget surplus in 2001 into what the CBO estimates will be a $401 billion deficit this year.

And while the CBO predicts that the deficit will swell to $480 billion in fiscal 2004 before being halved by 2006, some spending watchdogs say those estimates may be much too optimistic.

The Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan group that monitors government spending, recently predicted the deficit could swell to $523 billion next year and reach more than $5 trillion by 2013. The coalition cited as reasons the Medicare bill and the unlikelihood that Congress will allow many of Bush's tax cuts to expire.

"I really find it one of the most incomprehensible things in public policy since I've been in politics," said Rudman, a Concord Coalition founder who fought for balanced budgets throughout his two terms in the Senate. "Republicans suddenly don't care about deficits."

While some critics blame Bush for leading the party away from fiscal conservatism, Rudman said the House and Senate must share responsibility. Although he said the Republican majority is not solely at fault, he added, "We're in charge, so we're either going to get credit or blame."

Rudman said the country is heading for a "fiscal crisis" that will inevitably result in higher taxes, slashed benefits or both.

"We're acting like there's no tomorrow," he said, "and there is a tomorrow."

Fiscal policy expert David Boaz said that neither congressional leadership nor the president have been willing to tie the government's purse strings. Boaz, executive vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute, said the GOP's preoccupation with maintaining its majority has caused it to compromise its core beliefs in favor of "political calculations."

"You do expect that Republicans are put on earth to cut taxes and cut spending, and they're not doing that," Boaz said. "It's always easy to spend money before an election and worry about the future sometime later.

"Part of it is also I think just a loss of any sense that we came here for a purpose," he added, "not just to get reelected."

But Sununu said it's unfair to suggest the entire GOP has strayed from its fiscally conservative roots. Although he opposed both the Medicare and energy bills, he said he did so for very different reasons. Sununu said the Medicare bill didn't solve underlying problems with the program, while the energy legislation was awash in wasteful spending.

"It's an overgeneralization to say 'the party," Sununu said. But, he added, "There's no question that [the energy bill] had little in the way of fiscal restraint, and I don't think it was in keeping with a lot of the free-market principles that should be guiding the Republican Party."

U.S. Congressman Jeb Bradley, R-N.H., who was elected to his first term last year, said Republican spending was driven by world events, particularly terrorism.

"Part of it is the times we live in," he said. "A little over two years ago our nation was attacked very brutally, and that's caused a major realignment in terms of homeland security spending and national defense."

U.S. Congressman Charles Bass, R-N.H., said in a statement he was concerned about current spending levels but that fighting terrorism and nursing the economy back to health were the priorities.

Bass was elected to Congress in 1994 as part of a so-called Republican Revolution that gave the GOP the majority in the House for the first time in decades. The new majority was dedicated to balancing the budget - and pushed Clinton to enact the first one in decades -- though it has been unable to add a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.

"Incumbents, in general, like to remain incumbents," said J. Mark Wrighton, a political science professor at the University of New Hampshire. "And one way that they may be able to do that is by spending money."

But according to Boaz, of the Cato Institute, voters who elected the current Republican leaders - in Congress and the Oval Office - may be losing patience.

"The people who voted for George Bush thought they were going to get smaller government than if they voted for Al Gore," Boaz said. "And the question is whether they did."