He is renowned for his ingenuity, enthusiasm and persistence ... and has established himself as one of the legislature's most ferocious deficit hawks.

Such a lethal crossfire is the lot of a dying political breed: the deficit hawk, who obsesses on an accounting number as the lodestar of economic well-being.

DC reporters and columnists are endlessly willing to pretend that someone whose only real-world devotion is to cutting social welfare spending is a “deficit hawk.”

Some of them—like former deficit hawk Mick Mulvaney and former House Speaker Paul Ryan, who made his name in Congress as the GOP's budget-maker—deserve special ignominy for abandoning their fiscal conservatism when it was most needed.

Deficit hawk

Meaning

Noun