This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, April 20th, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown. Tea parties have

helped the GOP see a path to power, but are they truly plotting a return to limited government?

The GOP's credibility on fiscal matters so low and so

damaged what legacies of the Bush administration. Dramatic increases in government spending expanded

entitlements, trillions in new borrowing, and expensive and sticky foreign military and Samples Director of the Cato Institute's Center for Representative Government, comments.

I think we have to keep in mind the big picture here.

I mean, the GOP is in bad shape.

And roughly you can reduce the history of the GOP over the last 30 or 40 years to the following sequence.

Up until 1980, the Republican Party, particularly after Watergate, were really in disarray and decided

to be a lot like Democrats and try to compete for votes with spending and so on.

Reagan really changed both the party and the government in some

respects and I would say from 1980 to 96 1996 or 97 with some errors you still see a party that's trying to reduce spending, trying

to limit the size and regulations of the federal government, to some extent state governments too.

At that point though, the party that exists now is the party that began around

1997 or so.

And you know the real high or one might really say low points of that

party I think were 1998 with impeachment which was in a sense a way, this was the Republican Party

has become a party trying to counteract moral decay through the federal government.

So impeachment and then oddly the Iraq war itself the other major thing

which was also seen by neo-conservatives in that way and finally of course there's a the 1970s Republicans returned in a way

in the Bush administration with the prescription drug benefit where you see a

return to an attempt to take away democratic spending issues. Now that has been, it's fair to say, the

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