Where are small-government Republicans when Donald Trump attacks Amazon and Jeff Bezos? The GOP now condones large, intrusive government and presidential attacks on job creators — Jeff Bezos and Amazon today, anyone's guess tomorrow.

Kurt Bardella | Opinion columnist

Show Caption Hide Caption Report: President Trump wants USPS to double Amazon's shipping rates President Trump has urged the US Postmaster general to double shipping rates for Amazon and other companies, the Hill reports. Veuer's Sam Berman has the full story.

How many times have we heard Republicans talk about the need for a limited, decentralized government that stays out of the way of large and small businesses?

In 2009, Larry Kudlow, now director of President Trump's National Economic Council, warned that President Obama was “declaring war on investors, entrepreneurs, small businesses, large corporations, and private-equity and venture-capital funds.”

In 2010, Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee published a report concluding that “the Obama administration has created a regulatory environment that is suffocating the private sector’s ability to create jobs and grow businesses.”

In January 2012, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said “Obama demonizes and denigrates almost every sector of our economy.”

Congressional Republicans were so concerned with “executive overreach” that they formed a task force in 2016 to challenge Obama’s executive orders.

For the better part of this decade, Republicans have been adamant about the need to protect job creators and private enterprise from the shadow of the big, bad federal government.

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It doesn’t take an active imagination to guess how Republicans would react to a Democratic president using his office to specifically target and attack one of the most successful entrepreneurs and businesses in the world. And yet, as Trump continues to wage a one-sided war against Jeff Bezos and Amazon, the company he founded, those same Republicans who spent the decade attacking Obama and defending businesses and entrepreneurs have gone quiet.

Republicans appear to have traded their pro-business principles in favor of their anti-media hatred. Bezos is also the owner of The Washington Post, and Trump has made it no secret that he views the news media as the “enemy of the people.” His attacks against Amazon are clearly linked to his unprecedented war on the media.

The Post reported last week on Trump's demand to the postmaster general to double Amazon’s postage rates. That’s right, the president of the United States is using his office to settle a personal vendetta against a massive job creator.

Last June, Amazon reportedly employed 382,400 people, up from 268,900 the year before — that’s an increase of 113,500 net new jobs, or more than 46 states. By the third quarter of last year, Amazon was up to 541,900 employees.

As someone who worked for Oversight Republicans during the Obama presidency, I can tell you with 100% certainty that if Obama had done what Trump is doing, Republicans would have been the very first to find the nearest microphone and yell “abuse of power.” Questions about Obama's fitness for office would emerge, and congressional investigations would commence. The goal would be to effectively bring his presidency to a halt.

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The Republicans' collective silence today is just another illustration of their complete abandonment of their own orthodoxy. Silence is acceptance. The GOP is now the political party that condones attacks on job creators and entrepreneurs. It’s a new reality that should give every single business owner pause before contributing to the Republican Party. It might be Jeff Bezos and Amazon today, but as Trump’s history has repeatedly shown, it could be any CEO or Fortune 500 company tomorrow.

In September 2016, then-candidate Trump falsely accused Ford of planning to “fire all their employees in the United States and … move to Mexico." In January 2017, as president-elect, Trump threatened General Motors and Toyota with a border tax. He attacked Nordstrom when it stopped carrying his daughter’s clothing brand. He has also criticized, among others, Boeing, Rexnord, Merck, Lockheed Martin and the NFL.

The Republican Party's complete reversal on the appropriate role of the federal government is even more perplexing than Trump's behavior. Where are all the so-called small-government conservatives as the president of the United States openly threatens one private enterprise after another? Mind you, this is the same political party that held hearing after hearing in 2013 when it was believed (wrongfully) that the Internal Revenue Service scrutinized conservative organizations applying for tax-exempt status.

The very idea that a federal government agency could be used as an instrument to wield a partisan political agenda once incensed congressional Republicans. Sen. Ted Cruz suggested that the “IRS has become a partisan arm of the Democratic National Committee,” going as far as to say that “Richard Nixon’s ghost must have been smiling.”

Here we are in 2018 with the president of the United States ordering a federal government agency to extract retribution against a private entity, and Republicans are completely MIA. There are no oversight hearings scheduled. There are no Nixonian-comparisons from high-profile senators. There is just silence.

Kurt Bardella, a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors, is a former spokesman for Breitbart News, congressional Republicans and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. He left the GOP last year to become a Democrat. Follow him on Twitter: @kurtbardella