Sometimes I wonder this myself, but Is the GOP Still the Party of Economic Growth?:

Upon reaching the Oval Office, the new president’s first economic program meant to reverse an economic slowdown was not marginal tax rate cuts, but $80 billion in tax rebates. Though the latter merely shifted money from one set of hands to another, the president promoted the rebates in a Keynesian light meant to “put more money in peoples’ pockets.”

When it came to trade, this administration quickly slapped a 30 percent tariff on certain kinds of foreign steel, and followed up with tariffs on soft-wood lumber and shrimp. So bad was the administration’s reputation when it came to trade that Brink Lindsey of the libertarian Cato Institute felt compelled to point out that “U.S. credibility on trade, internationally, is hovering near zero.”
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Not content there, the president signed Sarbanes-Oxley into law, describing it as “the toughest piece of anti-fraud legislation since FDR.” Among other things, Sarbanes-Oxley foisted strict, time-consuming accounting rules on public firms irrespective of size, and it required public-company CEOs to sign off on the veracity of accounting statements with heavy personal liability if they were later proven incorrect. Talking about the impact of the new rules, Xerox’s Anny Mulcahy noted at the time that there is a “drive for averageness” in corporate suites today. And with the markets sensing the likelihood that CEOs would be forced to act more like accountants than entrepreneurs, the S&P 500 fell 175 points in the three weeks surrounding Sarbanes-Oxley’s passage.
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With the wind at his back after signing farm and prescription-drug bills, the president oversaw what Cato Institute scholar David Boaz describes as “the biggest expansion of entitlements since the LBJ years.” Though the president parroted his predecessor (Bill Clinton) in promising to “cut wasteful spending and be wise with the people’s money,” his desire to show “compassion” meant he never vetoed a spending bill of any kind during his first seven years in office.
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Still, if any of us had been secluded for the past seven years, a description of the Bush years without attribution would likely have had most any Republican assuming a Democrat had been in control. Is there an explanation for this? The first one would be that all politicians disappoint. By definition. Beyond that, given the statist direction taken by the Republican party in this decade, it’s fair to ask if it any longer represents laissez-faire growth. Many would point to the even harsher anti-growth views held by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, but it seems a lot of their stances at present are pure politics.

If Bill Clinton had done this, Republicans would have raised holy hell and we would never have heard the end of it and rightly so. It is unfortunate that Republicans did not govern what they campaigned on.