Norquist: "We want the Ryan budget. ... We just need a president to sign this stuff"

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source: The Daily Beast

Norquist: Romney Will Do As Told

Is Mitt Romney so weak he won't be able to stand up to Congress?

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Grover Norquist, head of the Americans for Tax Reform advocacy group, speaks at a session entitled "Scrap the Code: Towards Pro-Growth Tax Reform" at the conservative Americans for Prosperity (AFP) "Defending the American Dream Summit" in Washington on November 5, 2011 (NICHOLAS KAMM / AFP / Getty Images)

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The most quoted speech at CPAC this year was Mitt Romney's, but my vote for the most significant goes to Grover Norquist's. In his charmingly blunt way, Norquist articulated out loud a case for Mitt Romney that you hear only whispered by other major conservative leaders.

They have reconciled themselves to a Romney candidacy because they see Romney as essentially a weak and passive president who will concede leadership to congressional conservatives:

All we have to do is replace Obama. ... We are not auditioning for fearless leader. We don't need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We want the Ryan budget. ... We just need a president to sign this stuff. We don't need someone to think it up or design it. The leadership now for the modern conservative movement for the next 20 years will be coming out of the House and the Senate.
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The requirement for president?

Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States. This is a change for Republicans: the House and Senate doing the work with the president signing bills. His job is to be captain of the team, to sign the legislation that has already been prepared.
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This is not a very complimentary assessment of Romney's leadership. It's also not a very realistic political program: congressional Republicans have a disapproval rating of about 75%. If Americans get the idea that a vote for Romney is a vote for the Ryan plan, Romney is more or less doomed.

To date, sad to say, Romney has worked hard to confirm this image of weakness.

Nobody wants a president who acts as the passive instrument of even generally popular groups like labor unions. (Did you know that—despite decades of declining popularity—unions still have an approval rating of 52%? I didn't until I looked it up.)

But a candidate who appeases the most disliked people in national politics? That guy will command neither public affection nor respect.

Mitt Romney badly needs his Sister Souljah moment. Instead, he's running as Jim DeMint's doormat.

 

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Re: Norquist: "We want the Ryan budget. ... We just need a president to sign this stu

For Tax Pledge and Its Author, a Test of Time​

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Grover Norquist, who leads Americans for Tax Reform, has claimed he wants to reduce government
“down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”
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Next to the oath of office, it has been perhaps the most important commitment that Republicans in Congress can make. It is called simply “the Pledge,” and its enforcer is such a fixture in the party that he is known simply by his first name, Grover.

Signing it means a promise never, ever to vote for a tax increase.

But the pledge and its creator, Grover Norquist, a 56-year-old conservative lobbyist, have never before faced a test as they do now. The federal deficit stands at $1 trillion. The social safety net continues to grow — and, in the case of Medicare and Social Security, remains hugely popular. And unless the two parties can agree on a fiscal plan before Jan. 1, hundreds of billions of dollars of tax increases will go into effect automatically, meaning that Congress does not even need to act for taxes to rise.

The combination means that Mr. Norquist, whose long record of success is a rarity in Washington, finds himself in a tricky spot. Some top Republicans, including Speaker John A. Boehner, are saying they now agree with Democrats that the government must collect more tax revenue. Others have gone so far as to break with Mr. Norquist publicly.

By Mr. Norquist’s count, 219 House members — enough for a majority — and 39 senators have committed to the pledge. But some of those members who signed on, many of them years ago, have started to back away, apparently leaving him several votes shy of the majority he would need to block any tax increase.

“A pledge is good at the time you sign it,” said Representative Peter T. King, a New York Republican whose name still appears as a pledge signer on the Web site of Mr. Norquist’s group, Americans for Tax Reform. “In 1941, I would have voted to declare war on Japan. But each Congress is a new Congress. And I don’t think you can have a rule that you’re never going to raise taxes or that you’re never going to lower taxes. I don’t want to rule anything out.”

Mr. Norquist contends that every few years, several noisy Republicans say their support is squishy. Yet every time, he says proudly, the outcome is the same.

“It’s been 22 years since a Republican voted for a tax increase in this town,” he said in a recent interview. “This is not my first rodeo.”

Ask Republicans in Congress today what they think of the pledge, and many of them say that while they still subscribe to a low-tax view of government, they resent being hamstrung by a piece of paper they signed well before they were elected. Some of them are even saying they want out.

“I’m frankly not concerned about the Norquist pledge,” Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia said last week.

Senator John McCain noted with a certain sense of satisfaction at an Atlantic magazine forum last week that “fewer and fewer people are signing this, quote, pledge.”

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, at the same forum, said that with the federal debt at $16 trillion, closing tax loopholes and eliminating deductions have to be considered, “even though that may technically violate the pledge.” He added, “Sign me up.”

Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma has called the pledge a “tortured vision of tax purity.”

Ted Yoho, who will represent part of northern Florida when the new House convenes in January, said: “I’ll pledge allegiance to the flag. I’ll pledge to be faithful to my wife.” But he is one of a handful of House newcomers who declined to sign to Mr. Norquist’s pledge and likened it to a New Year’s resolution that many others will break.

Mr. Norquist claims to have invented the idea for a no-new-taxes promise when he was a 12-year-old volunteer for Richard M. Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign.

He is fond of evocative metaphors, like claiming he wants to reduce government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” Not honoring the pledge would cause grave damage to the Republican brand, he has said, likening it to a Coke can with a rat head in the bottom.

The walls at the headquarters of his interest group are covered with signed copies from conservative heroes like Newt Gingrich, who warns Republicans to stick to their guns. Mr. Gingrich, like Mr. Norquist, argues that the pledge protects Republicans from agreeing to stealth tax increases that ultimately hurt them.

“Every time I’ve watched Republicans try to be clever with Democrats on issues of taxation,” Mr. Gingrich said last week, “Democrats have won.”

In the current talks with President Obama, Republicans have signaled an openness to increasing tax revenue by reducing deductions and credits, as long as income tax rates do not rise. That would still violate the pledge, which states that “any and all efforts” to increase taxes are inexcusable.




Some Republicans have decided that they no longer like the lack of flexibility. “Basically the pledge is like a Master lock,” said Representative Scott Rigell of Virginia, who in January became one of the first freshmen to publicly renounce the pledge.

When Mr. Rigell announced his reversal, he braced for the consequences. Instead, he said, the word he received was a text message from his local Republican Party chairman saying, “Thanks for your courage.” Yet Mr. Norquist still includes Mr. Rigell’s name on his list of pledge signers.

Obama administration officials and other Democrats argue that Mr. Norquist’s pledge is doomed because Republicans will eventually need to square their budget policies with public opinion. With society aging and modern medicine developing new treatments, health care costs will continue to rise.

Voters express strong support for Medicare and Social Security and for raising taxes on the affluent, Democrats note. Over all, federal tax revenue has taken up a smaller share of gross domestic product in the last few years than at any point since the 1950s. One possibility is that the pledge will survive on a technicality. If Congress fails to reach a resolution before the tax cuts passed during the George W. Bush administration expire at midnight on Dec. 31, rates will revert to their higher pre-2001 levels. If Congress then approved a bill that restored only some of those lower rates but not, for example, ones for the highest income brackets, Republicans could still claim to be within the bounds of their pledge.

But Mr. Norquist argues that history suggests the pledge will survive on more than a technicality. Republicans, he said, have always come around, even if it takes a little pressure.

When he hears about someone wavering on the pledge, he has a simple routine, he says. “Every time this happens, I call the guy and say: ‘I just want to make sure we’re on the same page. I don’t want to have an argument,’ ” he said. “But if you really want to raise taxes, I do want to have an argument.”

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SOURCE: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/20/u...or-of-antitax-pledge-faces-big-test.html?_r=0

 

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Re: Norquist: "We want the Ryan budget. ... We just need a president to sign this stu

Some Republicans move away from no-tax pledge
_____________________________________

Nothing riles up the tea party
like a broken pledge against raising taxes.​

• Just ask Sen. Saxby Chambliss, a veteran Georgia Republican who this week turned his back on the Taxpayer Protection Pledge he signed years ago as a rite of passage in right-wing politics.
  
  Immediately labeled "worthless" and "a liar" on the website Tea Party Nation, Chambliss symbolizes the political conundrum facing GOP leaders after President Barack Obama's re-election.
  
  After years of opposing higher taxes on anyone, Republicans now are under pressure to work out a comprehensive agreement to reduce the nation's chronic federal deficits and debt.
  
  That means a compromise with Obama and Democrats, who insist on more tax revenue being part of a package that includes spending cuts and entitlement reforms.
  
  "To call Chambliss an idiot is to insult people of lower intelligence," blogger Judson Phillips of Tea Party Nation wrote. "Chambliss is a poster child for every thing that is wrong with the political class in Washington."
  
  Later in his post, Phillips sharpened his point: "If you give your word and you break your word, then you are a liar."
  
  Phillips also called Chambliss the worst RINO -- Republican In Name Only -- in Washington, citing an acronym that conservatives use for those they consider to be sell-out politicians.
  
  "If you are a worthless Republican politician and you want some good press from the liberal media," Phillips wrote, "all you have to do now days is say you are considering abandoning your pledge not to raise taxes."
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• Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, have questioned whether the Norquist pledge remains politically relevant in the face of the mounting federal debt and Obama's re-election.

• GOP Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee said "the yin and the yang of this is that we know there has to be revenues." "I haven't met a wealthy Republican or Democrat in Tennessee that's not willing to contribute more as long as they know we solve the problem," Corker noted, adding that reforming entitlement programs such as Medicare, the government-run health care system for senior citizens, was another key part of the package.

SOURCE: http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/23/politics/fiscal-cliff/

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Re: Norquist: "We want the Ryan budget. ... We just need a president to sign this stu

Meanwhile​

'No one is caving," Grover Norquist says emphatically and repeatedly when we meet this week in his office in the nation's capital. By "no one" he means congressional Republicans, and by "caving" he means surrendering to Barack Obama's call for tax increases. Republicans are facing an avalanche of pressure from the White House, the media and even many on Wall Street to abandon their antitax principles to avoid a "fiscal cliff."

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Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324352004578137112355225342.html

 

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Re: Norquist: "We want the Ryan budget. ... We just need a president to sign this stu


More congressional Republicans break tax
pledge for sake of looming fiscal crisis



The decades-old pledge from the Americans for Tax Reform group has been signed by 238 House members and 41 senators in this Congress and has essentially become inescapable for any Republican seeking statewide or national office over recent election cycles, especially in the Republican-controlled lower chamber.

But, more congressional Republicans appear to be breaking the long-standing pledge to oppose tax increases before returning to Washington on Monday to avert a looming fiscal crisis with a deal that increasingly appears impossible to reach without changes to the tax code:

• <SPAN style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffff00">New York Rep. Peter King</span>. "I agree entirely with Saxby Chambliss,” King said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “A pledge you signed 20 years ago, 18 years ago, is for that Congress. … The world has changed, and the economic situation is different.”
  
  The New York congressman said he was opposed to tax increases but that “everything should be on the table” when President Obama, House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid try to broker a deal.
  
  “I'm not going to prejudge it, and I'm just saying we should not be taking ironclad positions,” King added. “I have faith that John Boehner can put together a good package.”

• <SPAN style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffff00">Sen. Lindsey Graham</span>. Sen. Lindsey Graham said Sunday he would break the pledge and accept tax changes to generate more revenue to curb the trillion-dollar federal deficit.
  
  Graham has suggested earlier that he would be open to changes in taxes, but repeated Sunday only if Democrats are willing to cut federal spending by scaling back entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security.
  
  “I will violate the pledge, long story short, for the good of the country, only if Democrats will do entitlement reform,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.”

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SOURCE