Norquist on the Obama Tax-and-Spend Agenda

Most of us are used to seeing Grover Norquist on TV, often depicted as a meddling tax miser who has a Svengali-like grip on the GOP. A few facts about Norquist. He is 57, the son of a Polaroid Corporation VP and the husband of a Palestinian Muslim who worked for USAID. They have two adopted children. He graduated from Harvard College and also has a Harvard MBA. He sits on the boards of the NRA and the American Conservative Union and is a member of the 6-person panel that selects the Time Magazine person of the year. He founded Americans for Tax Reform, whose primary policy goal is to reduce government revenues as a percentage of the GDP. ATR states that it "opposes all tax increases as a matter of principle." ATR supports the Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR) and transparency legislation, while opposing cap-and-trade legislation and efforts to regulate health care. Norquist gave a far-ranging interview to Newsmax this week, expressing his views about President Obama's State of the Union wish list. As part of our discussions about the new Obama agenda, with its proposed new spending and additional tax revenues, while claiming it can all be done without adding a dime to the deficit, I want to summarize Norquist's comments, because his views will be influential as debate heats up in Congress about how to deal with the expensive Obama agenda. (1). Norquist opposes the President's call to raise the minimum wage by 24 percent, saying it will not help 15 million low-wage workers. Norquist believes the GOP House is acting wisely in opposing it. "We know from history that when the minimum wage was first put in, hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs. It was particularly devastating to African-Americans. The minimum wage has a very sad history in terms of stopping people from getting their first jobs, stopping people who are untrained from getting trained at work. So the minimum wage is a very bad piece of legislation. It’s hurt people in the past and until we come to grips with the damaging history of it, why would anybody think of doing again something that’s already failed?” (2) Norquist is confident that most of Obama's other spending plans will be defeated by the Republican House. (3) He supports the GOP's opposition to the Senate Democrat $110 billion plan to delay sequestration, a plan that includes tax increases. “Sequestration will take effect,” Norquist told Newsmax. “Interestingly, it was Obama’s idea. He put it forward, thinking it would pressure the Republicans to raise taxes. It failed to do that and now Obama has to live with a law that he supported, he wrote, he signed. Sequestration is a good thing. It saves about $100 billion a year for 10 years into the future. Are there ways to alter it by keeping the same dollars in savings but giving different departments more flexibility? That’s an option. Republicans are open to that.“ But, Norquist said the dollar amount of the savings cannot be changed. "There will be no tax increases to replace savings to taxpayers with tax increases ripping off taxpayers. Republicans wanted something that hit defense a little less hard and shifted the reduction elsewhere. Democrats don’t want to do that. So there’s no place for a compromise. Raising taxes instead of cutting spending is not a compromise -- that’s called losing,” he told Newsmax. (4). Norquist opposes the president's desire for a national cap-and-trade energy tax. Obama says he’s not afraid to use executive orders to push his agenda, but Norquist said: “He will try to do things through executive order because he’s not going to be able to raise taxes or spend additional money or change laws in a dramatically stupid way as long as the Republicans have the House of Representatives and as long as the Democrats are scared about getting re-elected in the Senate. There are some things he can do by executive order, but raising taxes is not part of that." (5). Norquist described the congressional stand-off relating to tax reform: “no pro-growth tax reform could pass the Senate; no pro-growth tax reform would be signed by the president,” Norquist says. “But it’s a good idea for the Republicans in the House to design tax reform and come up with some alternatives, because it says here’s what we would do if there was a Republican Senate and a Republican president.” (6). Norquist has called Obamacare a half-trillion-dollar tax increase on the American people. “There are over 20 taxes in Obamacare, and at least eight of them directly hit middle-class Americans,” he said. “They all hit middle-class Americans indirectly by hitting doctors and insurance companies and hospitals. So this is a very bad bill with a lot of damaging taxes and regulations. But we may have to wait until people see the damage before you can fix it. The three networks, even though the 3,000-page Obamacare legislation passed two years ago, haven’t covered what’s in there. Have you learned on network television about the 21 tax increases? The establishment press, which has been cheerleading for Obama, has not done its job informing the American people.” (7). Norquist told Newsmax that the immigration plan put forth by Florida Senator Marco Rubio has “some very good ideas. The outline he’s got is a fine starting place. We need to have border security. We need to have a path to legal status for people so that people in this country for years and their children don’t hide when the police come by, that they are secure in the jobs and their positions. But we need to defeat the labor unions which are the guys who sculpted the present nonworking immigration laws we have. The center-right needs to get together and come up with a good immigration law recognizing that the labor unions are going to fight anything reasonable and we need a united conservative movement to beat the unions. ~~~~ In addition to evaluating the Obama-congressional battle over the President's agenda, Norquist also commented on Karl Rove’s American Crossroads launch of an effort to weed out GOP primary candidates it deems unacceptable, a move criticized by members of the tea party. Norquist offered his opinion on the Republican in-fighting: “We need to look back at some of those races where people the tea party nominated were the wrong guy and realize that Harry Reid spent millions of dollars to interfere in the Republican primary to choose the candidate who couldn’t beat the Democrat and to stop the candidates who would have beat the Democrat. That wasn’t a tea party problem. That was the Democrats playing the Republican primary. Todd Akin in Missouri was not supported by the tea party groups. He was supported by the Democrat candidate, the incumbent, who ran ads pretending to attack him but really praising him for a solid conservative voting record. Karl Rove and others have correctly pointed out: How did we end up with idiot candidates? Well, you end up with idiot candidates when the Democrats choose your candidate for you." ~~~~ Dear readers, Norquist explained what's going to be happening in Washington for the next two years. The debate will twist and turn but it will do so around the issues and positions spelled out by Grover Norquist -- not because he controls the GOP but because he and the GOP agree. And they agree because they both believe in the fiscal responsibility of Congress to balance the budget and reduce the national debt. And to keep taxes as low as possible to prevent the government from taking so much of the nation's wealth for public programs that it chokes off the private sector expenditures that generate jobs and drive forward productivity and technical development. These axions did not originate with Grover Norquist. They come from the great 18th century political enlightenment philosophers, led by Locke and Burke and they are the engines of all validly Republican programs and principles.