Hastert Delenda Est

The Washington Monthly has a hell of a cover package this month: Seven well-known conservatives dump on the GOP majority and announce their support for a Democratic vote this fall. Former Congressman current MSNBC host Joe Scarborough rages, rages against the dying of the Right in terms that could have come from Reason Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie.

Compare Clinton's 3.4 percent growth rate to the spending orgy that has dominated Washington since Bush moved into town. With Republicans in charge of both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue, spending growth has averaged 10.4 percent per year. And the GOP's reckless record goes well beyond runaway defense costs. The federal education bureaucracy has exploded by 101 percent since Republicans started running Congress. Spending in the Justice Department over the same period has shot up 131 percent, the Commerce Department 82 percent, the Department of Health and Human Services 81 percent, the State Department 80 percent, the Department of Transportation 65 percent, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development 59 percent. Incredibly, the four bureaucracies once targeted for elimination by the GOP Congress–Commerce, Energy, Education, and Housing and Urban Development–have enjoyed spending increases of an average of 85 percent.

It's enough to make economic conservatives long for the day when Marxists were running the White House.

The rest of the essays are interesting, but I'm disappointed the Monthly couldn't nail down a sitting Republican to diss the majority and pray for relief from Majority Leader Murtha. Earlier today I spoke with Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) for an upcoming Reason package, and as much as I pressed him to come up with reasons for libertarians to pull the GOP lever, he accentuated the negative. I'd ask him to present a great policy that a new GOP majority might push through, and Flake would lean his head back, exhale, and say something like: "At this late date? Adjournment."