AMERICA:Grover Norquist is important because of the threat he poses to Republican Party members who deviate from his anti-tax pledge, writes LARA MARLOWE
ONE OF the most powerful men in the US is an avuncular-looking, Harvard-educated, 54-year-old conservative lobbyist who has never stood for public office and whose name is unknown to the average American.
Grover Norquist established his Republican credentials at the age of 12, when he volunteered to work on Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign. Ronald Reagan urged Norquist to establish Americans for Tax Reform, a group that “opposes all tax increases as a matter of principle”.
In the midst of the Great Debate Over Whether to Destroy the US Economy this week, liberal Democrats unearthed speeches by Reagan advocating tax increases in the early 1980s.
Reagan has attained idol status on the American right, which forgets he increased taxes a dozen times, though he left office a net tax-cutter. “Every one of those was a mistake,” Norquist said, explaining that Reagan was “pushed” into them by Democrats and “liberal” Republicans.
For 25 years, Norquist has brow-beaten Republican candidates for Congress into signing a pledge that they will never vote for anything that in any way resembles a tax increase. With huge success: 95 per cent of Republican representatives and senators have signed.
“He has importance because of the potential threat he poses to members of the Republican Party who deviate from his pledge,” says David Rohde, professor of political science at Duke University.
An editorial in the New York Timesthis week called Norquist's pledge "the single biggest reason the federal government is now on the edge of default". As the US draws frighteningly close to the precipice, Republican lawmakers are torn between their fear of Norquist and the realisation that if the August 2nd deadline is passed and the economy collapses, polls show that they – rather than President Obama – will shoulder the blame.
In the late 1980s, Norquist travelled to the dirty little conflicts fanned by the US in the twilight of the Cold War, offering succour to Nicaraguan Contras, Mozambique’s Renamo and Jonas Savimbi’s Unita. He then embarked on a guerrilla war of a different kind, against the US government.
“I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub,” Norquist famously told National Public Radio in 2001. He believes government can be cut in half by 2025, and another half by 2050.
The Wall Street Journaldubbed Norquist "the Grand Central Station" of conservatism. But in American politics, you can always find someone more extreme. Norquist has been pilloried by social conservatives for his openness towards homosexuality and Islam. He is a member of the advisory board of GOProud, a gay conservative group. With his Kuwaiti-born wife, Samah Alrayyes, he co-founded the Islamic Free Market Institute.
Despite his hard line on tax increases, Norquist provided a glimmer of hope of resolving the debt-ceiling crisis when he told the Washington Post's editorial board on Wednesday that allowing $4 trillion worth of Bush era tax cuts to expire at the end of 2012 would not violate his pledge, as long as Congress did not vote to allow the expiry.
Norquist reiterated that stance in an opinion piece in yesterday's New York Times. But with characteristic hyperbole, he stood firm on all other attempts to eliminate tax credits, exclusions or deductions. "When a mugger passes you on the street leaving you unmolested, he did not in fact give you your wallet," Norquist wrote.
The success of Norquist’s pledge has inspired a veritable pledge mania among Republicans this year, as special interest groups strive to give prominence to their issues. A half dozen presidential hopefuls have signed the Susan B. Anthony pledge to appoint anti-abortion officials and cut funding for Planned Parenthood. The Cut Cap and Balance pledge to pass a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget reached its zenith on Tuesday evening, when a Bill bearing the same name passed in the House. It died yesterday in the Democratic-controlled Senate.
The marriage vow pledge, invented by Evangelical Christians in Iowa, created a scandal with a statement that a child born into slavery was more likely to be raised by two parents than a black infant born “after the election of the USA’s first African American president”. The offending sentence was deleted. The pledge still contains promises of marital fidelity and “robust childbearing and reproduction”, and a commitment to oppose same-sex marriage and women in combat roles. It has been signed by two Republican presidential candidates.
In the past, Americans pledged to forswear alcohol or sex, to limit their own terms in office or fight corruption.
“Over the last half century, there has been a precipitous decline in trust in government and trust in politicians,” says Prof Rohd. “These pledge efforts are a reflection of that. People want to find a way of holding politicians accountable.”