The Republican Party is no stranger to hypocrisy. In fact, the entire Republican ideology is built on a lie: that they’re the party of small government.

The reality is much different. Republicans favor less government spending, except when it comes to the defense industry or agricultural subsidies. Republicans favor individual choice, except when the choice is to marry the person you love or to have an abortion.

I could spend this entire column listing such examples, and while I might find it cathartic, I doubt it would be terribly enlightening. Hopefully you’re noticing a pattern here — Republicans are the party of small government whenever it is convenient for them.

Republicans need the defense industry’s cash, so they support more defense spending. Republicans need the crucial aging white bigot vote, so they would rather pass a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage than let the states make their own decisions. The list goes on and on, and the Republican Party of Wisconsin is no exception.

While Wisconsin Republicans’ most notable hypocrisies are mostly the same as those of the national party, there a few recent examples that deserve special attention.

Over the last few years, the (Republican-controlled) Wisconsin Legislature has passed a series of bills that not only take away rights from tenants, but in fact prohibit municipalities from having their own more tenant-friendly laws. While this is awesome if you’re a landlord, it’s slightly less awesome if you’re a college student trying to get your security deposit back.

Here we go again with that wonderful Republican hypocrisy: Local governments should have as much control as possible, since they know their residents best — unless, of course, this would hurt rich landlords who donate to the GOP.

An even more recent example is the Republican-supported bill that would take away the ability of local governments to regulate sand fracking, a process in which a mixture of water and sand is pumped into a well at high pressure to fracture rock and release oil or natural gas.

Now, I’m nowhere near qualified to discuss the possible merits or demerits of fracking. That is an entirely different — although still important — issue. However, regardless of how safe fracking may or may not be, it doesn’t make any sense (assuming you want what’s best for the people of Wisconsin) to take away the ability of local governments to regulate the process. If a county collectively decides they’re okay with barely-regulated fracking within their borders, then that’s all well and good. If, on the other hand, a county wants strong protections against environmental abuses, why shouldn’t they be able to have them?

The answer is that there is no good reason — especially if you’re from the party of “small government.” Why, then, would Republicans want to strip control of sand fracking regulation from local governments? Or, more to the point, who would benefit from this change? Surely it’s not the average Wisconsinite, who would only be better off having more of a say in what happens to the land they live on. That leaves one very obvious possibility: the companies actually doing the fracking.

It’s perfectly understandable why sand fracking companies would want this law passed. They know Republicans at the state level favor less regulation, and less regulation allows them to offload the costs of their business onto Wisconsinites in the form of negative externalities. Once again, Republicans have sold out their belief in “small government” in favor of helping already-rich mining companies get even richer.

To anyone who even occasionally follows politics, none of this should come as a surprise. Being the party of “small government” sounds good, but it isn’t always feasible. More often than not, Republicans end up being the party of “whatever our donors want,” which sometimes, but not always, overlaps with their supposed ideology.

Joe Timmerman ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in math and economics with a certificate in computer science.