You probably know that Mr. Rubio is proposing big tax cuts, and may know that among other things he proposes completely eliminating taxes oninvestment income — which would mean, for example, that Mitt Romney would end up owing precisely zero in federal taxes.
.. What you may not know is that Mr. Rubio’s tax cuts would be almost twice as big as George W. Bush’s as a percentage of gross domestic product
.. So when Mr. Rubio genuflects at the altars of supply-side economics and hard money, he isn’t telling ordinary Republicans what they want to hear — by and large the party’s base couldn’t care less. He is, instead, pandering to the party’s elite, consisting mainly of big donors and the network of apparatchiks at think tanks, media organizations, and so on.
In the G.O.P., crank doctrines in economics and elsewhere aren’t bubbling up from below, they’re being imposed from the top down.
Mitch McConnell’s Stance in Confirmation Fight Could Help and Hurt G.O.P.
Mr. McConnell’s strategic affront — announcing just hours after Justice Scalia’s death that he would refuse to even consider a replacement — was presaged by other Republican moves over the last two years. A week ago, the Republican chairmen of the House and Senate Budget Committees said the president’s budget director should not be allowed to testify at their budget hearings, a move without modern precedent. Last year, Senate Republicans dragged out the confirmation of Attorney General Loretta Lynch for more than 150 days.
At the heart of nearly every major policy battle between the White House and congressional Republicans has been the contention by conservatives that Mr. Obama does not respect the Constitution, almost ensuring advance contempt for any nomination he would make.
.. Democrats were quick to criticize Mr. McConnell’s decision.
“McConnell’s precipitous action is reminiscent of his statement in 2010 that his prime goal was to prevent Mr. Obama’s re-election,” said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York. “Obama hadn’t presented his proposals for the upcoming Congress; now he hasn’t named a nominee for the court.
The Republican Party’s Internecine Fights Spill Into the Open
Yet on Saturday, all that happened! Trump accused George W. Bush of lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Marco Rubio accused Ted Cruz of lying, a charge Cruz rejected as “knowingly false.” Trump refused to retreat from a long-ago television interview calling for George W. Bush’s impeachment.
.. For a decade and a half, Republicans have stifled internal debates about the George W. Bush presidency. They have preserved a more or less common front, by the more or less agreed upon device of not looking backward, not talking candidly, and focusing all their accumulated anger on the figure of Obama. The Trump candidacy has smashed all those coping mechanisms. Everything that was suppressed has been exposed, everything that went unsaid is being shouted aloud—and all before a jeering live audience, as angry itself as any of the angry men on the platform. Is this a functional political party? Is this an organization readying itself to govern? Or is it one more—most spectacular—show of self-evisceration by a party that has been bleeding on the inside for a decade and longer?
On Economic Stupidity
Yet the truth is that Mr. Trump’s position isn’t that far from the Republican mainstream. After all, Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, not only berated Ben Bernanke, Ms. Yellen’s predecessor, for policies that allegedly risked inflation (which never materialized), but he also dabbled in conspiracy theorizing, accusing Mr. Bernanke of acting to “bail out fiscal policy.”
And even superficially sensible-sounding Republicans go off the deep end on macroeconomic policy. John Kasich’s signature initiative is a balanced-budget amendment that would cripple the economy in a recession, but he’s also a monetary hawk, arguing, bizarrely, that the Fed’s low-interest-rate policy is responsible for wage stagnation.
.. You see, Mr. Sanders argues that the financial industry has too much influence on the Fed, which is surely true. But his solution is more congressional oversight — and he was one of the few non-Republican senators to vote for a bill, sponsored by Rand Paul, that called for “audits” of Fed monetary policy decisions. (In case you’re wondering, the Fed is already audited regularly in the normal sense of the word.)
.. But even without Mr. Paul’s bill, one shudders to think about how U.S. policy would respond to another downturn if any of the surviving Republican candidates make it to the Oval Office.