The GOP has always and only stood for big government. Just their form of big government.
Might want to revise that statement in the face of folk like:
Barry GoldwaterRecent enough to not need examples.
Warren G HardingTook a machete to Woodrow Wilson's progressive-fascist gov't. Strangled the infant Progressive flowering in gov't in the crib. Reduced size and scope of gov't dramatically.
Calvin CoolidgeContinued WGH's gov't reductions.
"When you see ten problems rolling down the road, if you don't do anything, nine of them will roll into a ditch before they get to you."
----Calvin Coolidge
"It is more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones"
----Calvin Coolidge
"They criticize me for harping on the obvious; if all the folks in the United States would do the few simple things they know they ought to do, most of our big problems would take care of themselves."
----Calvin Coolidge
"... it is probable that a press which maintains an intimate touch with the business currents of the nation is likely to be more reliable than it would be if it were a stranger to these influences. After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world."
----President Calvin Coolidge's address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Washington D.C., January 25, 1925
...the ultimate assessment of his presidency is still divided between those who approve of his reduction of the size of government programs and those who believe the federal government should be more involved in regulating and controlling the economy.
With the exception of favoring increased tariffs, Coolidge disdained regulation, and carried about this belief by appointing commissioners to the Federal Trade Commission and the Interstate Commerce Commission who did little to restrict the activities of businesses under their jurisdiction.[102] The regulatory state under Coolidge was, as one biographer described it, "thin to the point of invisibility."
Robert TaftAs the U.S. Senate's main opponent of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal domestic policies, after Roosevelt's death Taft successfully led the conservative coalition's effort to curb the expanding power of labor unions in America. Taft was also a major advocate of the foreign policy of non-interventionism.
Cooperating with conservative southern Democrats, he led the Conservative Coalition that opposed the New Deal. The Republican gains in the 1938 congressional elections, combined with the creation of the Conservative Coalition, had stopped the expansion of the New Deal. However, Taft saw his mission as not only stopping the growth of the New Deal but also eliminating many of the government programs that had already come from it.
A staunch non-interventionist, Taft believed that America should avoid any involvement in European or Asian wars and concentrate instead on solving its domestic problems. He believed that a strong U.S. military, combined with the natural geographic protection of the broad Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, would be adequate to protect America even if the Nazis overran all of Europe. Between the outbreak of war in September 1939 and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 Taft opposed nearly all attempts to aid Allied forces fighting the Nazis in Europe.
Taft condemned the postwar Nuremberg Trials as victor's justice under ex post facto laws, in which the people who won the war were the prosecutors, the judges, and the alleged victims – all at the same time. Taft condemned the trials as a violation of the most basic principles of American justice and internationally accepted standards
I could vote for a Zombie Cal.