Interest-group Conservatives

Slate editor Jacob Wiesberg has an informative summation of the Republican's transition from being haters of "big government" to being "interest-group conservatives". Money quote:

A recent Cato Institute study points out that for the 101 biggest programs that the Contract With America Republicans proposed to eliminate as unnecessary in 1995, spending has now risen 27 percent under a continuously Republican Congress. Likewise, the conservative notion of deregulation has been supplanted by a demand for moralistic regulation, while the demand for judicial restraint has been replaced by pressure for right-wing judicial activism.