On April 1, 2018, when Thad Cochran retired after 40 years as a U.S. senator from Mississippi, he made history; Cochran was the last Republican in Congress to have ever voted to increase federal taxes. He had done so on Dec. 19, 1990, when Republican President George H.W. Bush, deeply concerned about the rising federal budget deficit, persuaded Cochran and 18 other Republican senators to join 35 Democratic colleagues (this was a different era, remember) and to vote to cut federal spending and to raise Americansâ taxes. Since that date, no Republican in the House or the Senate has voted to raise taxes. Think about it: The U.S. budget deficit that so upset President George H.W. Bush that he broke his 1988 campaign pledge of âno new taxesâ had risen to $221 billion (with a âbâ). Compare that to the record of the most recent one-term Republican president who had, in March 2016, told Robert Costa and Bob Woodward of The Washington Post that, as president, he could pay down the national debt --then about $19 trillion â in eight years by stimulating economic growth and renegotiating trade deals, but during his four years in the White House presiding over the nationâs national debt, it exploded by close to 40%, to $27.8 trillion (with a âtâ).