Fiscal Responsibility and Partisan Politics

I was reading about Republican US Senate candidate Rich Tarrant’s campaign kick off party that took place last night and the theme captured by the press was that Tarrant doesn’t like “partisan politics.”

Well, that sounds good, right? I mean partisan politics must be a bad thing, since it is always used as a negative.

But what happens when the two parties represent philosophies of government that are diametrically opposed? How can debates not become partisan?

These days, since the Democrats have moved so far to the left that even the self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders has climbed into bed with them, the only way a Republican can avoid “partisan politics” is to move to the left, too.

I am not trying to pick on Tarrant, and I am surely going to vote for him in November, should he be the GOP candidate, but this is a disturbing trend, to say the least.

It was a Bush strategy to co-opt the Democrats’ issues in order to neutralize them, but that is part of what has lead to the obscene spending habits of our supposedly Republican-controlled government.

This out-of-control spending was much of what Tarrant spoke out against in the reported parts of his speech. If that is what he means by being non-partisan – speaking out equally against both sides – then I am 100% behind him.

But, bemoaning the government's spending frenzy is not being non-partisan. The Democrats have never favored spending less government money. The Democrats’ idea of fiscal responsibility is raising taxes more than enough to cover their excessive spending, so they can have all their programs and brag about a surplus.

No, what Tarrant is doing with this issue is reminding us what a Republican is supposed to stand for. The Republicans in Congress have lost their way and they have ceased to represent the principles they were elected to uphold.

Being a strong voice for fiscal responsibility is not being non-partisan; it is being something we have a much greater need for.