Grover Norquist gave a talk to a surprisingly small audience at the New America Foundation today, promoting his new book. As always, he is too funny to really dislike, and admirably plain-spoken in his hostility toward anti-immigration Republicans like Tom Tancredo. But today, beyond the aphorisms, I actually learned something.
Norquist's brilliant tactical insight as head of Americans for Tax Reform was to insist that tax politics be absolute, as in the No New Taxes pledge that he asked candidates to take. He would never let the debate be about which taxes to raise or by how much, but about whether to raise taxes, to which the answer always had to be no. Ever since the 1990 budget deal reached at Andrews Air Force base during the George H.W. Bush administration, the Republicans have held the line on abolutist tax politics. Today Norquist said that while he was tempted to ask politicians sign a similar pledge to cut government spending, he couldn't do it, because spending didn't lend itself to the same absolutist politics.
So I asked him how that brand of zero-tolerance politics would work out in 2010, when the Bush tax cuts expire and even under a best-case scenario -- McCain in the White House and the current numbers of Republicans in the House and Senate -- all the cuts could not be extended permanently. On the estate tax alone, the votes are not there for permanent repeal, and some agreement will need to be reached quickly, or the tax will drop to zero in 2010 then back up to the 2000 levels in 2011, making estate planning difficult. For that reason, and because of the sheer cost of extending the cuts, the debate in 2009 and 2010 is not going to be reduced to a simple raise taxes/don't raise taxes fight. It will be exactly what Norquist has been trying to avoid, a fight about how much to raise taxes.
Norquist's answer had two parts -- first, that all the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts should be extended without paying for them. But second, that anything that was not a change to the existing law would not count as a violation of the "No Tax" pledge. So even though Republicans are already attacking the expirations (which they wrote into law) as "the largest tax increase in history," for purposes of Norquist's pledge, it is not. The estate tax could go back to its previous level, taxes on capital gains and dividends could go back to the Clinton-era levels, etc., and Norquist's pledge would not be broken.
This is astonishing. There's a lot of room to regain some of the revenues necessary for health care and public investment just within the Bush tax cuts. The absolutist politics of no taxes has been by far the most powerful weapon in the conservative arsenal. It's era is officially over.
-- Mark Schmitt.
