GOP Budget Victory

It’s too early to celebrate, since there is no way to know what will come out of the conference committee and ultimately be enacted, but the Republican leadership’s victory late last night–the party’s budget passed the House 217-215–strikes me as important. The bill makes only the most modest cuts in the nation’s metastasizing entitlement programs, but even those cuts are controversial in the current political climate. It seems to me that it is absolutely essential for the Republican Party to maintain its status as the party of (relative) fiscal restraint. At times during the Bush administration, the party has come perilously close to losing that status. So it’s a very good thing that for now, at least, the party has a record of at least minimal spending discipline to run on.

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