Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, recently sat down with Fox News Digital last week to offer some pointed remarks about the dynamics of partisan politics in the context of fighting increased taxes and spending.
“There are two competing factions in the United States that have been around for at least 50 years and will be for the next 50 years,” he said. “The Republican Party is a coalition of groups and people that sit around a table, and they’ll all want the same thing: they want to be left alone on their vote-moving issue.”
He views the Republican Party as increasingly comprised of single-issue voters.
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“Leave my money alone, my property alone, my small business alone, my guns alone, my homeschooling alone, my parental rights alone! Leave me alone! That’s what I vote on. I’m not asking for somebody else’s money… I’m not asking you to send me cash or tell me I’m swell. I’m asking you to leave me alone on my vote-moving issue, and by the way, I’ve only got one vote-moving issue.”
Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform group has been building broadly based coalition of these competing interests at his famous weekly meetings in DC. His small government, economics first, big-tent message was a driving force in pushing the Republican Party in this direction.
“That’s why we can get together because the guy who goes to church all day, and the guy makes money all day, and the guy who fondles his guns all day, have nothing in common, and no conflict. That’s not how I spend my time, but you do what you do: just leave me alone. So, that’s why the coalition works,” Norquist said.
Norquist is a leading critic of what he deems the desire of the American Left to control, and subsequently redistribute, government resources.
“On the left, you have a takings coalition: all around the table the people who view the proper role of government as taking money from somebody and giving it to them…Trial lawyers, government labor unions, government employees, the big city political machines, the various coercive utopians, the radical environmentalists,” he added.
Norquist has long been critical of government entities like the EPA, which he argues, are key mechanisms for the American Left to restrict private property rights and control Americans’ lifestyles.
However, Norquist believes the coalition of the left will eventually turn on one another because they’re made up of “competing parasites.”
“Then they’ll turn on each other, because the left is not made up of friends and allies. It’s made up of competing parasites, and if you don’t feed them taxpayers, they will clearly grab what’s in the other guy’s hand and take it for themselves,” he said. “The job of the modern Republican Party: don’t raise taxes, don’t give them more money, make them push people away from the table so that they cost us less, and then repeat.”
Norquist cites dual reasons as to why Trump was not more successful in upending the DC spending and taxation machine:
“Well, two things. Trump did not run as a guy who was going to spend less, and he didn’t have much experience in the federal government. Ronald Reagan stood and held the waves back, and leaned against the wall and the wall didn’t fall over on top of him,” he said. “When George Bush showed up, he thought Reagan was just resting there. He didn’t think it was necessary to spend half your time doing this and the other half doing whatever you’re trying to get done.”
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Reagan represented a turning point in the battle for limited government, according to Norquist.
Norquist believes that the current GOP leadership is stuck in between a rock and a hard place:
“Well, what’s happening with the Republican Party is you don’t have the leadership you might want at the national level because the head of the House and the head of the Senate Republicans spend all their time managing their coalition. They don’t get to lead it, they get to manage it,” he said. “You can’t sort of say, OK guys we’re all doing this, because five people walk out of the room, and you don’t have a majority in the House.”
Yet, he believes Republican initiatives at the state level offer an instructive path for an often dysfunctional national party leadership.
“But the real leadership right now is at the state level,” he added. “There are four states that are holding spending below the growth of the wages of their people. You can look at certain governors and say that’s the kind of person that if they did in their state if we did that in Washington, that would be winning.”
