The principles of small government and fiscal conservatism have been abandoned to such an extent by America's de facto conservative party that it is no longer the default position of the party to reject on its face legislation that is hostile to the concepts of economic liberty and fiscal responsibility.

Watching news coverage of the euphemistically-titled "stimulus" bill being rushed through Congress, I was struck by something perhaps even scarier than the atrocity of the legislation itself. It was the utter and complete lack of ideological opposition to the bill in concept and principle. The Republican party, ostensibly the party of small government fiscal conservatism, failed as a collective body to question the fundamental assumptions and spirit of the bill on ideological grounds. Republican leadership is both missing the point and asking the wrong questions.

Republican opposition to the grab-bag appropriations bill being touted as an economic stimulus should have been rooted in opposition to government intervention in markets, exponential increases in budget deficits and national debt, the resulting threat of rampant inflation, and the historical failure of Keynesian government debt schemes to ever mediate an economic recession anywhere in the world as theorized. Particularly, their opposition should have been based on a fundamental difference in ideology and principles with the socialist Democrat party model that has been employed since the administration of Franklin Roosevelt.

The entire party should have publicly and proudly withheld their support for the bill in a wholesale rejection of "bipartisanship", defined in Democrat Congressional politics as giving up something you want in exchange for everything we want. Instead, Republican opposition was confined to levels of degree while fundamental assumptions and ideologies were not questioned, and in fact taken for granted. Republicans began with the same assumption as their Democrat counterparts: that government is actually capable of stimulating demand through spending, and that it is necessary and appropriate at the present time to do so. With no ideological and conceptual divide standing in the way, the focus became on details and trivialities rather than a greater debate about the legitimacy of the entire idea in the first place. The principles of small government and free markets were entirely absent from the discussion.

In the absence of any objection to the idea of a "stimulus package" in and of itself, we were told about what precisely the stimulus should be. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Republican talking heads were adamant that the package should be "timely, targeted and temporary"; a three-word motto so ambiguous and terse it could have come out of the political sloganeering handbook. With those three words in mind, the major points of contention came down not to the staggeringly huge one trillion (with a "T") dollars to be created and financed through multi-generational debt, but the minutiae of exactly HOW the smorgasbord would be divvied up. For example, whether to re-seed or re-sod the National Mall, what brand of cars to purchase for the new 600 million dollar federal fleet, whether to use domestic or foreign materials suppliers for construction projects, whether or not birth control is economically beneficial, and which particular Democrat party sycophants should receive what amounts of taxpayer dollars.

This has not seemed to alarm most mainstream Republican and conservative commentators and pundits, but it represents a paradigm shift that has been ongoing since the advent of George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism", which just racked up a trillion dollar debt of its own, albeit over the course of several months instead of in a single day. The principles of small government and fiscal conservatism have been abandoned to such an extent by America's de facto conservative party that it is no longer the default position of the party to reject on its face legislation that is hostile to the concepts of economic liberty and fiscal responsibility, but rather to mediate the degree of constraint on economic liberty and the degree of fiscal irresponsibility. This can only spell further decline for the Republican brand as it substantially merges in fundamental principles with the socialist Left and alienates the small government, free market coalition of conservatives that propelled it to power the past two decades. Power without principles is equally as useless as principles without power. Real leftists do not want light leftism anymore than conservatives do. Republicans are becoming a product without a market.