South By North Strategies, Ltd.

The Baseline Scenario analyzes congressional votes on major tax and spending issues and unearths surprising patterns in “hawkopcrisy.”

The bottom line: As a party, the Republicans who will be railing against fiscal irresponsibility and threatening to block a raise in the debt limit are the irresponsible ones themselves who created the need to raise that debt limit. The Democrats can claim to be somewhat less irresponsible; more to the point, perhaps, insofar as they did vote to raise the debt, at least their current behavior (assuming that most support the administration and vote to raise the debt limit) is at least consistent with their past votes.

The post goes on to look at the voting records of individual members of the House and Senate.

Of course, it’s more fun looking at an individual level. And the only people who can claim not to be responsible for the national debt — at least not via any of these five bills — are the newly elected members (except Rob Portman and Pat Toomey, who voted down the line to increase the debt as Congressmen) and Tom Coburn, who joined the Senate in 2005 and voted against both the stimulus and the 2010 tax cut.
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By contrast, Republican leaders Mitch McConnell and Jon Kyl each voted for $2.3 trillion of debt (75 percent), yet will somehow try to argue that the need to raise the debt ceiling is not their fault.
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On the flip side, the only people who voted for all $3.1 trillion of debt are Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Susan Collins (R-ME), generally considered moderates. (Liberals think Nelson is a closet Republican, and conservatives think Collins is a closet Democrat.) Following Nelson and Collins, at $2.8 trillion, are Max Baucus (D-MT), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Mary Landrieu (D-LA), and Olympia Snowe (R-ME) — also generally considered centrists. One inference you could draw is that bipartisan centrists are the last thing we need, since they vote for both tax cuts and spending increases. Of course, the December tax cut is Exhibit A in the problem with bipartisan compromise, at least from the perspective of the deficit.