The New York Times Sheryl Gay Stolberg asks an extremely important question about the Republican Revolution of 1994 in the Week in Review section: "Whatever happened to the promise of smaller government? "

[G]overnment has only grown. The Cato Institute, a libertarian research institution, says overall federal spending has increased twice as fast under Mr. Bush as under Mr. Clinton. At the same time, the federal deficit is projected to hit a record high of $427 billion this year.

These trends seem likely to continue. The White House estimated last week that the cost of prescription drugs for Medicare beneficiaries, originally projected at $400 billion from 2004 to 2013, would, in fact, be $724 billion from 2006 to 2015. Republicans called for scaling back the benefit, but on Friday, Mr. Bush said no and vowed to veto any changes to the Medicare bill.

"The era of big government being over is over," declared Marshall Wittmann, a senior fellow at the Democratic Leadership Council, a centrist Democratic research organization. That would certainly seem to be borne out in the record of the Republican revolutionaries, known as the "Class of 1994" for the year they were elected. Of the 30 who are still in the House of Representatives, 28 hsponsored bills in the last Congress that would have increased government spending overall, according to the National Taxpayers Union, an antitax group.

Check out this entire must-read article to get an idea of the degree to which the GOP has expanded the federal government in the last decade, and especially in the last four years. It is as if they were able to become as corrupted as the Democrats were after 40 years in control of the House in only 10 short years. Nice work.