In 2009, when Barack Obama proposed a relatively modest economic stimulus — one that Paul Krugman, among others, warned was roughly half the size that was needed — Republican politicians and economists screamed bloody murder. Now, with COVID-19 panic gripping the world, and a Republican in the White House, it’s a totally different story. Surprise, surprise. As David Dayen noted Wednesday, the stimulus package the U.S. Senate may have passed by the time you read this is “not a $2 trillion bill, [but] closer to $6 trillion, since bailout money helps capitalize $4.25 trillion in leveraged lending by the Federal Reserve.
Just because this ideological switchback is so predictable doesn’t mean we should shrug it off. Becoming habituated to GOP hypocrisy is a crucial part of how and why they continue to get away with it. Normalizing bad-faith politics, to put it another way, is a central goal of bad-faith politics.
One person who’s not habituated is Bruce Bartlett, who was a domestic policy adviser in the Reagan administration and then a top Treasury official under George H.W. Bush. He was one of the first establishment Republicans, along with John Dean, to break ranks with the party during the George W. Bush years. When he called out the current GOP’s hypocrisy on Twitter, I stood up and took notice. Continue reading.