When the Republicans went insane: Newt Gingrich, Fox News, Grover Norquist and the roots of today’s

http://www.salon.com/2014/09/20/when_the_republicans_went_insane_newt_gingrich_fox_news_grover_norquist_and_the_roots_of_todays_shameful_intransigence/



Understanding the GOP revolution means studying the mid-'90s, when Fox and Drudge began, and tax pledges meant all

When the Republicans went insane: Newt Gingrich, Fox News, Grover Norquist and the roots of today’s shameful intransigence
Heather Cox Richardson
Saturday, Sep 20, 2014 11:00 AM EST

Although Movement Conservative imagery had put him in the White House, George H. W. Bush’s inaugural address signaled that he would back away from the movement’s extremes. He promised to bring the budget into balance. But since popular programs—Medicare, Social Security, veterans’ benefits, food stamps—took up 65 percent of the budget and defense spending took up most of the rest, there was very little room for cuts. Bush suggested hopefully that volunteerism could replace expensive social programs. He told Americans the nation had a “high moral principle” to “make kinder the face of the Nation and gentler the face of the world.” He deplored the rise of partisanship in Congress and called for bipartisan cooperation.

Bush tried to repair the damage to the nation’s finances wrought by Reagan’s policies. Between 1980 and 1989, the federal debt had tripled to $2.8 trillion, interest payments cost $200 billion a year, and budgets were still badly out of balance. The debt problem had been bad when Reagan left office, but it got worse almost immediately as the federal government stepped in to clean up the mess of collapsing savings and loan institutions to the tune of $132 billion.

In 1990, Bush faced an estimated $171 billion deficit for the next fiscal year. This amounted to 4 percent of GNP, less than the deficits of the 1980s but a greater problem for Bush than deficits had been for Reagan because a 1985 law that went into effect in 1991 would require automatic cuts of 40 percent across the board if something weren’t done. “I’m willing to eat crow,” Bush wrote in his diary. “But the others are going to have to eat crow. I’ll have to yield on ‘Read My Lips,’ and they’re going to have to yield on some of their rhetoric on taxes and on entitlements.”

But Bush had badly underestimated Movement Conservatives. In fall 1990, he and his lieutenants in Congress hammered out a deal with congressional Democrats that made deep spending cuts, demanded that future appropriations be paired with a way to pay for them, and called for $134 billion in new taxes. Movement Conservative congressmen signed on in private but in public they launched a broadside against the deal as an affront to economic growth, common people, and Reagan.