 Grover
Norquist has never held elected office. He's not a political
appointee or a congressional staffer, and few voters know his
name. Yet this anti-tax lobbyist wields immense power over the
Republican Party, enforcing a hard-line position that compels
the GOP to protect tax breaks for the rich and billions in
federal subsidies for America's wealthiest corporations. "It all
comes from a single guy," says Alan Simpson, the former
Republican senator. So how does Norquist do it?
Norquist's influence over the GOP
began in 1985, when Ronald Reagan tapped the little-known
staffer at the Chamber of Commerce to head up Americans for Tax
Reform, a pressure group organized to push a comprehensive tax
package through Congress. With backing from the Chamber,
Norquist – a Harvard MBA and former head of the College
Republicans – challenged GOP candidates to take a two-part
pledge: that they would never raise taxes, and that they would
only close tax loopholes if the additional revenue was used to
pay for further tax cuts. Before long, he had 102 congressmen
and 16 senators signed up.
Over the past 25 years, Norquist has received funding from many
of America's wealthiest corporations, including Philip Morris,
Pfizer and Microsoft. To build a farm team of anti-tax
conservatives, Norquist shrewdly took the pledge to state
legislatures across the country, pressuring up-and- coming
Republicans to make it a core issue before they're called up to
the big leagues. "We're branding the whole party that way,"
Norquist says. "The people who are going to be running for
Congress in 10 or 20 years are coming out of state legislatures
with a history with the pledge."
Norquist also built the anti-tax
pledge into the DNA of the GOP by hosting weekly Wednesday
meetings that enable activist groups representing everyone from
gun nuts to home-schoolers to mix with top business lobbyists
and conservative officials. The meetings, which began shortly
after Bill Clinton was elected, turned Norquist into the
Republican Party's foremost power broker – and gave him a forum
to enforce the no-new-taxes pledge as the centerpiece of the
GOP's strategy. "The tax issue," he says, "is the one thing
everyone agrees on."
Norquist cemented his influence by
forging an early alliance with Karl Rove and setting himself up
as a gatekeeper to George W. Bush's inner circle. Then, after
Obama was elected, this ultimate Washington insider positioned
himself as a leader of the anti-establishment Tea Party,
complete with financial support from the billionaire Koch
brothers. "These Tea Party people, in effect, take their orders
from him," says Bruce Bartlett, an architect of the Reagan tax
cuts. "He decides: This is a permissible tax action, or this is
not a permissible tax action. And of course, anything that cuts
taxes is per se OK."
Today, GOP politicians who have signed Norquist's anti-tax
pledge include every top Republican running for president, 13
governors, 1,300 state lawmakers, 40 of the 47 Republicans in
the Senate, and 236 of the 242 Republicans in the House. What's
more, the GOP's Tea Party foot soldiers are marshaled by House
Majority Leader Eric Cantor – a veteran of Norquist's farm team,
who first signed the pledge as an ambitious member of the
Virginia legislature. Under Cantor's leadership, Norquist's
anti-tax pledge was directly responsible for last summer's
debt-ceiling standoff that wrecked the nation's credit rating by
leading the nation to the brink of default. "Congress was
willing to cause severe economic damage to the entire
population," marvels Paul O'Neill, Bush's former Treasury
secretary, "simply because they were slaves to an idiot's idea
of how the world works." |
