(Vice) -- he Republican war on government is no secret. For decades, the GOP has worked in concert with a coterie of right-wing institutions to cripple core functions of the state ranging from tax collection to public schools to healthcare. The party and its leaders are sometimes honest about their aims, like when Ted Cruz talks about abolishing the IRS, or when Newt Gingrich said they hoped Medicare would "wither on the vine" in the 90s. But they go about them in a piecemeal way, like a man trying to burn down his house by setting individual items of furniture on fire. Donald Trump's latest budget proposal outlined a host of harsh cuts that targeted mainly the poor, his EPA has worked to abdicate its responsibility to ensure the nation has clean air and water, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is being dismantled from the inside, and Trump's congressional allies want to make it harder for poor people—especially children and the elderly—to eat.
But the hairpin-turn logic Republicans employ to erode the government usually isn't so obvious as it was Tuesday, when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell decried the old GOP bugbear of government spending.
The hypocrisy here would be astounding if anyone had the capacity to be astounded anymore. After spending the Obama era frowning and sighing about how the national deficit (the gap between annual government spending and revenues) was troublingly high, Republicans decided last year to explode that same figure with a tax cut package massively tilted toward the rich and corporations. When warned by various experts that cutting taxes would mean lower revenues and therefore higher deficits, Republicans attacked those analyses as biased and claimed the deficit wouldn't go up all that much. Predictably, the experts were right and the deficit did increase because of the tax cut—despite the persistence of magical supply-side economic thinking. But after Congress passed a bipartisan spending bill that jacked up military spending among other priorities, McConnell is apparently back to caring about the deficit.