How Republicans Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Deficit!

Rand Paul, the Kentucky senator, made a nuisance of himself the night of Feb. 8 when he tried to shame fellow Republicans into voting down a $300 billion spending increase.

- Peter Coy and Sahil Kapur

He asked, “If you were against President Obama’s deficits and now you’re for the Republican deficits, isn’t that the very definition of hypocrisy?” He put up a series of posters of allegedly wasteful federal spending, including a $356,000 scientific study that he said was designed to determine “whether Japanese quail were more promiscuous on cocaine.” And he refused to allow a vote before the midnight deadline for budget extension, forcing a technical shutdown of the federal government that lasted several hours.

Senate colleagues of the sleepy-eyed physician-politician were unimpressed. John Thune of South Dakota, the Senate’s second-ranking Republican, called Paul’s jeremiad “a colossal waste of everybody’s time.” One mean person on Twitter wrote, “Every member of the GOP in that room is thinking, ‘Now I know why the neighbor beat him up.’ ”

Paul’s peers could afford to tune him out for one simple reason: Voters don’t care about federal budget deficits. And that, in a nutshell, is why the deficit hawk is an endangered species in the environs of Washington.

Voters used to care about deficits. In 2013, when Obama was trying to get the economy out of its post-recession doldrums, reducing the budget deficit ranked third on the public’s list of priorities, behind only the economy and jobs, according to polling by Pew Research Center. The public’s fear of red ink made it easy for Republicans in Congress to oppose Obama’s infrastructure-spending proposals.

By this January, reducing the budget deficit had tumbled to 14th on the list, between immigration and drug addiction, according to Pew. The decline in concern crossed party lines.