David M. Drucker: Republicans are becoming the party of big government

President Donald Trump’s populist renovation of the Republican Party is ushering in a new era of America’s center-right as a champion of the New Deal social safety net.

What’s a Democrat to do? (More on that momentarily.)

No less than Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has become an outspoken voice for extending the Affordable Care Act health insurance subsidies relied on by millions of Americans. The Georgia Republican, 51, has always prided herself on running for Congress — in 2020 — because she opposed the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. The Trump acolyte was disgusted with GOP failures to repeal President Barack Obama’s signature health insurance reform law.

But Greene’s U-turn shouldn’t be all that shocking to anyone paying attention.

“The Republican Party has been fundamentally transformed by Trump,” said Paul Sracic, an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington.

Sracic spent years as a political science professor at Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Ohio, ground zero for this transformation. He watched firsthand as Trump, beginning in 2016, attracted legions of longtime working-class Democrats to the GOP. They might have been socially conservative — indeed, many were — but they were the exact opposite of the typical suburban fiscal conservative. They now occupy prime real estate in the Republican governing coalition, and so Sracic isn’t surprised at the GOP’s party-of-government turn.

“These former Democrats think that the government caused their problems by the actions it took, particularly with regard to trade, and so they think it’s the government’s responsibility to solve these problems,” Sracic told me. “I sometimes refer to them as New Deal Republicans — and that’s kind of what they are.”

But small-government Republicans also remain in the GOP’s midst. They’re in Congress and your state house and dominant in conservative think tanks. Like their forebears in a bygone era of Republican politics, their beliefs are defined by faith in free markets and suspicion of government meddling in society.

These traditionalists support overhauling the popular entitlement programs Medicare and Social Security, the health insurance and pension programs for seniors, respectively. They’re proponents of repealing the well-regarded Affordable Care Act. Some like-minded conservatives stubbornly point to Trump’s, and congressional Republicans’, support for tax cuts, deregulation and limited spending cuts as proof that not much has changed.

One of them is David McIntosh, president of the Club for Growth, a group that ostensibly intervenes in GOP primaries on behalf of candidates who support smaller government. “President Trump is the only Republican leader bold enough to seriously roll back government and unify former Democrats with life-long Republicans,” McIntosh insisted in an emailed statement. “Rather than judging rhetoric, we are focused on results, including preventing a $4.5 trillion tax increase by passing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and securing a $9 billion rescission package earlier this year.”

Yet slowly but surely, McIntosh and other Republicans influenced by President Ronald Reagan are finding themselves sidelined in the political party they once ruled.

Institutionally, Republicans have abandoned policies that would restructure Medicare and Social Security. Congressional Republicans are sitting idly by while Trump wields tariffs with abandon and directs the U.S. government to take ownership stakes in private-sector companies — both massive federal interventions in the American economy.

Yes, Republicans approved Medicaid cuts and reforms as part of the OBBBA, but only over the grumbling of several GOP lawmakers who complained that their constituents would be adversely affected. And of course, as Greene makes plain, Republicans have given up on “repealing and replacing” Obamacare and now largely embrace the once-polarizing health care law.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the conservative nonprofit American Action Forum, has watched glumly as Republicans have drifted away from their small-government traditions. The former Congressional Budget Office director speculates that, aside from political changes wrought by Trump, a cascade of national traumas has simply led more voters to look to Washington for help and reassurance — from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to the Great Recession to the coronavirus pandemic.

“There was a traditional conservative discipline that went through a checklist that said: ‘Can the private sector deliver this?’ And if the answer was ‘yes,’ you were done,” Holtz-Eakin explained. “There was a default that said: ‘Let the private sector do things.’ The default’s gone. The default is now actually ‘the government’ in a lot of cases.”

Democrats — remember them? — will naturally argue the point, fighting for their historic claims to President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.

And after all, Republicans in Congress are currently fighting Democrats over extending the Affordable Care Act subsidies. Democrats are demanding those subsidies be continued in exchange for voting to reopen the government.

But that fight isn’t about a disagreement over Obamacare subsidies at all. Rather, it’s about power politics. Republicans, including Trump, have basically acknowledged that they’re going to have to support some sort of legislation to maintain the availability of health insurance under Obamacare. Many of their constituents rely on the subsidies. Meanwhile, Republicans in this fight have positioned themselves all along as the party against shutting down the government as leverage to squeeze policy concessions out of their opposition. Historically, that’s the role Democrats would assume during GOP-instigated government shutdowns.

The primary reason Republicans are delaying cutting a deal over the Obamacare subsidies? They don’t want to be seen as caving to the Democrats and rewarding the minority party on Capitol Hill for flexing its muscles. If that’s the case — if Republicans can credibly claim to be the party of the social safety net — Democrats might need to reexamine how they plan to distinguish themselves.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

David M. Drucker is columnist covering politics and policy. He is also a senior writer for The Dispatch and the author of "In Trump's Shadow: The Battle for 2024 and the Future of the GOP."

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