I was on the road this afternoon when I caught on the radio Rush Limbaugh’s mention of a 2011 article by CF&P Chairman Dan Mitchell, in which he argued against the conventional wisdom that the 1995 government shut down harmed Republicans.
This debate matters because the argument is frequently used to break down the will of those who seek to limit government and impose fiscal sanity on Washington. Now that some liberal Democrats are threatening to shut down the government in hopes of undoing the tiny “sequester cuts” that merely slowed the growth of government, what Mitchell highlighted should serve to harden the resolve of advocates for limited government:
The conventional wisdom about what happened in November of 1995 is very misleading.
Republicans certainly did not suffer at the polls. They lost only nine House seats, a relatively trivial number after a net gain of 54 in 1994. They actually added to their majority in the Senate, picking up two seats in the 1996 cycle.
More important, they succeeded in dramatically reducing the growth of federal spending. They did not get everything they wanted, to be sure, but government spending grew by just 2.9 percent during the first four years of GOP control, helping to turn a $164 billion deficit in 1995 into a $126 billion surplus in 1999. And they enacted a big tax cut in 1997.
