Are There Fiscal Conservatives in a Pandemic? The Club for Growth Says It Doesn’t Matter.

“Prominent conservative groups are refusing to criticize Republican lawmakers and President Donald Trump for the massive spending package, and polling shows fewer than 1 in 10 Republican voters disapprove of the measure’s passage.
That tells you something about the current state of the conservative movement. When the last Republican president signed the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), otherwise known as the 2008 bank bailout, polling from Gallup found that fewer than half of all Republicans supported it. When President Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the $833 billion stimulus passed in the wake of the last economic collapse, only about 30 percent of self-identified conservatives approved, Gallup found.

Now, we’re spending a whole lot more money with a whole lot less opposition.

As Reason Editor at Large Matt Welch put it last week: “There is no more politics of fiscal prudence in America, just a competition to see who can wag the biggest firehose.””

“If fiscal conservatism still held any cache among Republican lawmakers, voters, and activists, there would have been an outcry about President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress inflating the deficit to record highs over the past three years. It wasn’t all that long ago that grassroots conservatives were toasting the toppling of high-ranking Republicans for lesser slights.”