June 11, 2009 12:00 PM
[Grover Norquist is president of Americans for Tax Reform (ATR). He addressed attendees of the Conservative Heartland Leadership Conference on June 4, 2009. The Transcript below contains not only his remarks to the conference, but his answers to questions from the audience.]
I guess step one after the 2006-2008 elections is not to take the advice of our enemies and go home and quit. That’s from some of the pundits who tell us they’re friends or allies who are giving us the same advice as our enemies, that we should move to the Left or give up our principles.
We’ve been through this before. I think we’ve largely avoided the panic of throwing down our shields and running. After the ’64 election, the establishment explained that conservatism is finished and all gone. After the ’74 Richard Nixon/Watergate challenges and the very bad election there, we were told the same thing. After the ’82 bad election, the ’86 bad Senate election, the ’92 election of Clinton, the Democratic House and Senate, the press on Clinton was almost the same as on Obama, about how wonderful he was and he was not ideological, and conservatism was finished. So we’ve been through this argument that we should give up and go home and it’s all over. And the other team makes the case that we should do that largely because they know it’s not true. They know perfectly well that when we get our footing, we’ll be back at them, and they are quite concerned about it.
There are two projects that I’d like to talk about as things that have had some success and I recommend them to others. The first is the Taxpayer Protection Pledge. Back in 1986 Reagan created the Americans for Tax Reform to be the outside group to push for what became the Tax Reform Act of ’86, and in doing that, I created the No Tax Increase Pledge at the federal level to keep rates down. People would take a pledge, it was witnessed by two people, it’s an 8 ½” by 11” sheet of paper and you sign your name that you will never allow an income tax increase, that you won’t support it or vote for it. And we were picking up support for that. We had about 100 House members, 20 senators in ’86.
What really helped was when all the candidates except Dole took the pledge in ’88 when they were running for President. Dole was asked on TV the night before the New Hampshire primary if the rest would sign the pledge, would you? And he reacted as if he would sign the pledge, and he reacted as if he was a vampire being offered a cross. [Laughter] A visceral shaking of his head. He wouldn’t make that commitment. And while the pledge was a national issue, the only place in 1988 where everybody understood the pledge is I borrowed it from New Hampshire which had a pledge to oppose a broad-based income or sales tax. So, everybody in New Hampshire knew what the pledge was. And he wouldn’t do it, lost the primary. He was supposed to win in New Hampshire.
Bush ended up winning the presidency. But two years later he was convinced by the smartest man in the world that he should raise taxes, did, and then lost the presidency in ’92. So he took the pledge, won the primary, took the pledge, won the general, broke the pledge, lost re-election, threw away an otherwise perfectly good presidency that Reagan had bequeathed to him. And then in the next couple of election cycles, we got 90-plus percent of all the Republicans running for House and Senate to take the pledge and keep it.
By having it, every once in a while people would say, “Well, why don’t you change the pledge now to cut taxes 10 percent or change the Pledge to be for a Fair Tax or whatever?” If you keep moving it around, it wouldn’t have meant anything. By being a very reasonable line in the sand, “Don’t raise taxes,” we weren’t asking to cut taxes in half, we weren’t asking to abolish any particular type, just a line in the sand and don’t cross it. We were able to then hold people to it.
And we all in this room have lived through a very historic period in American history. The 15 years between June of ’93 and six weeks of the Obama Administration, those 15 years, 15-plus years, that is the longest period in American history without tax increase out of Washington, DC. It’s the only 15 year period in American history without tax increase out of Washington, DC, going back to Jefferson and Washington and all those guys. Because we were able to hold the pledge, we were able to stop tax increases at the national level.
Now, the state, then 16 days into the Obama Administration, he raised taxes on tobacco. You may remember his commitment promise that he’d never raise taxes on anyone earning less than $250,000 a year. The only American who earns more than $250,000 a year and smokes cigarettes, his name is Barack Obama. [Laughter] So, immediately, 16 days into his presidency, he raised taxes on 25 percent of the American people who were middle and lower income.
That said, I like the Pledge because people put it in writing. It’s not a 20-point manifesto. I’m not asking you to do 12 things. I’m not asking you to walk backwards and do a back flip. I’m asking for a very simple thing, “Don’t cross this line.” Citizens can understand it, even politicians can understand it, the press can understand it, and it doesn’t require me to do the enforcing. Every once in a while I hear, “Well, what do you do if somebody raises it?” I said, “What do you mean, what am I going to do? Imagine the guys who run against them in the next primary, what they will do. Imagine what the press will do to them. Imagine what the citizens of their state will do because we make these pledges available to everybody. So, I don’t have to go hit them on the back of the head with a crowbar if he breaks his pledge. “
The pledge, by the way, isn’t to ATR or to me personally. It’s to the citizens of the state that somebody is from. We now have 1,100 state legislators who take a similar pledge, and that is a pledge no net tax increase doesn’t get in the way of tax reform as long as it’s not a net tax increase.
So, the Pledge itself has been a useful tool, and I recommend that concept as a central, like you’re asking for one thing, not forty things and you are asking for something that seems terribly reasonable. Now, when the government spends too much money, all of a sudden the terribly reasonable line in the sand looms rather large and unreasonable in the minds of some elected officials, but I think it is a reasonable request on our part.
But, again, it’s not the only thing we want. We want cutbacks. And during, actually, the eight years of the Bush Administration, we passedatax cut every one of those eight years, some of them pretty small and some of them pretty temporary. But we passedatax cut every one of those eight years.
The other thought is, and it was mentioned, the Center Right Coalition. In 45 states we have Center Right Coalition Meetings, and the idea there, and I recommend not only your participation in your own states, the Center Right Meetings Alan Cobb runs, the one in Kansas, Don Racheter in Iowa, Ed Martin in Missouri. Greg Blankinship is putting one together in Illinois. The point of the Center Right Coalition Meeting is not to have the 40 most conservative people in the state meet, not to have the 40 or 50 guys who all agree on everything meet. They don’t need to meet; they already agree on everything. What you want is the representative groups, institutions, and tenancies that if everybody they speak with and for and represent showed up and voted, we’d win with 60 percent of the vote. And so that the people who are active and leaders in the various communities can share with everybody else what they’re doing. It’s not a time to give lectures on First Principles or how people came to believe what they believe. It’s to talk about what they’re doing and what their projects are.
I’ve been to too many meetings where somebody said, you know, “If Reagan would do this. Reagan should do this. You should get 100,000 people to come to Washington and do a rally.” Assigning work to other people who are not directly paid by you or married to you is not a useful project line, okay? And I’m all in favor of what can we do to get President Reagan more easy to do this or, you know, to not do this, or to get Bush to do something or a congressman or senator. That’s work, that’s a project. What I’m going to do is try and make it easy or difficult for elected officials to go the direction I want them to go in or not the direction I want them to go in.
But whining that the rest of the world has disappointed you, most of us about age 13 or 14 realize that the world is not structured around what we want, and that by announcing that we’re displeased that this is going on is not good enough to fix it, stop it, or make it better. So, I would argue that the Center Right Meetings and larger meetings such as this are terribly important. We need to keep them forward-focused. There’s only so much conversation we can have about how Bush disappointed us or this, that, and the other thing. And unless you’re doing an autopsy for purposes of improving things in the future, whining about the past isn’t terribly useful. And people talk about what they’re doing. What are you actually doing? Not what you’re feeling, not what you’re thinking, not what you wish other people would do, but what is it you’re doing that other people can learn from and who will join in?
So, those two project lines. One, the Pledge, singular, simple, easy to understand, easy to enforce. I’ve never had anyone come in and say, “Oh, look, you think I voted for a tax increase on Tuesday, but I didn’t.” This is very finite, you did or you didn’t. The dime doesn’t land on the edge; it’s heads or tails. On Tuesday you raised taxes or you didn’t. And that makes it easy to enforce, and we don’t change it every week or month or decade in order to keep the pledge the same.
So, those two project lines I recommend as ones that have been successful and helped move with the general movement forward.
[Audience question: Last year in Las Vegas, Richard Bayberry gave a speech comparing the different factions of the Left and to the Right. One of the differences he made was he said those on the Left tend to unite, put aside differences, and work very hard towards their goal [during elections]. Whereas on the Right people will not necessarily do that. … What are the ways to get the Right … onboard at the same time to enact the change?]I’m not sure I buy the argument that the Left works together better than the right on a regular basis, because I’ve listened to the Left when they were losing elections whine that they didn’t work together. But they beat us in the last two elections and we need to get back on the playing field. But we should work to nominate and elect the most Reaganite Republican we can in any given district or state. Now, we need to understand that that’s going to be a little bit different in Maine than Texas, and so it’s like grading on a curve. I want the two Republicans out of Maine. They are much better than the D’s we would have had out of Maine. Okay? We’ve been disappointed in their votes from time to time. There are two teams, there are two major Parties in the United States. They are heading in completely different directions.
Now, those of us who are more than a hundred years old remember an America where the two Parties were regional Parties. If you were born north of the Mason-Dixon Line, you were a Republican. If you were born south of the Mason-Dixon Line, you were a Democrat. And everybody in Illinois got slightly confused about all this. [Laughter] But basically, they were regional Parties, and to tell you that somebody was a Republican told you they were from the North. It didn’t tell you their position on the size of government or the role of the state or anything else, and the same thing with D’s. It was during the lifetime of Ronald Reagan that the two Parties were separated out into what I consider much more rational divisions, and the people who lived in the South who agreed with Ronald Reagan were voting for George McGovern because of the branding and Mom had always done this. They eventually gave that up. And we get surprised when some Lincoln Republicans look around and they’re voting for Republicans or thought they were Republicans because they were from northern New York State and weren’t connected with the modern reigning Republican Party. We need to run Lincoln Republicans, people who there for historical reasons, into Reagan Republicans, people who are there because they understand liberty and want to fight for that.
But there are two teams. Sometimes our lead guy in a House race, a Senate race, a state legislative race, a presidential race is not everybody we wanted, but the reason McCain got the nomination was a bunch of people who might have weighed in early and gone for some of the others chose not to. So, look at that. You are the reasons he got the nomination if one held out because somebody else wasn’t perfect.
On the other hand, McCain would be much, much better for the country and the republic than Obama. So, you don’t always get the nominee you want in every case, but if we do our job right and work hard, we get better nominees and better candidates each time.
But, again, the most Reaganite candidate that a district and a state will support is what I think as serious conservatives as people want radical change for liberty should be for, recognizing that you’re not going to elect a hundred senators who look and act just like you would want them to.
[Audience question: I want to get the panelists’ reaction to this quote from Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative, “I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient. I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is needed before I have first determine whether it is Constitutional.”]
One of the things I think Goldwater was saying is that limited government is competent government, and only limited government can be competent government. Government, in my opinion, will only have so much. It will only have so much time and attention, and if you try to do 20 or 20,000 things, you are not going to do them well. Sometimes when outsiders looked at Ronald Reagan, they said, “Gee, he’s got three things he’s working on, and yet if you focus a little bit more, you could get more done.” But if the government’s spending 20 percent of the GDP, guess what’s it not going to spend it wisely. And if you’re working on 10 percent of the GDP, you would do that better. And once in a while somebody says, “Oh, you shouldn’t be for limited government, you should be for competent government.” You can’t have competent big, fat, bloated government.
And as for a working definition of who our team is, when I look around the meetings that we have in DC or at a Coalition meeting, I would argue that people show up from Center Right Reagan Republicanism. Everybody is there because a particular issue moves them at the end of the day. I mean, they may have many opinions, but there is an issue that moves them to politics. And if you go around the table, taxpayers want to be left alone with their incomes, businessmen, everybody is in the room because of an issue that moves them to politics. They want to be left alone.
Second, I’m on the board of the NRA. We want to be left alone with our Second Amendment rights. We don’t go insisting every 4th-grade child be taught books in public schools about hunters. [Laughter] We’ve got businessmen and women who want to be left alone, taxpayers want to be left alone, property owners want to be left alone, homeschoolers want to be left alone to educate their kids. They are not knocking on your door and telling you to homeschool. They want to be left alone to homeschool. All the various communities may not agree on how to get to Heaven, but they want to be free to practice their faith and raise their children. They don’t ask the government to give out Baptist stamps or tell everybody to be an Episcopalian. So around our table, everyone is in because they want to be free in one particular zone. Now, they may also agree with other people around the room, but there’s one thing that motivates them, which is why you need to work well together, because we don’t want something at the expense of anybody else in the room. The guy who wants to go to church all day may look across the table at the guy who wants to make money all day and say, “Well, that’s not how I spend my time.” But they are not in conflict in terms of wanting to be left alone. They both look at the guy who wants to fondle his guns all day and say, “Well, that’s not how I spend my time.” We don’t have to agree how we spend our liberty. We do agree we want a limited government so that we can be free.
And then what part of freedom people are most excited about and get excited and go vote may differ around the table. We don’t have to have tea together, we don’t have to be best friends. We just have to show up and vote for the same guy and against the same guy one day every two years. We’ll get a pretty good consensus on that.
[Audience question: Some people have said that the 2006 and 2008 elections were a referendum on the invasion of Iraq and how that went. Does the definition of conservative foreign policy change considering the 2006-2008 election? And more specifically, does the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive invasion survive the 2006-2008 election and continue as part of our definition of conservative to be pre-emptive in our invasions of other countries?]
Your reading of the polls is correct of what happened to us in 2006. It’s not that ours didn’t show up. It’s that the independents who otherwise voted for us didn’t show up because of not the invasion of Iraq, but the occupation of Iraq. You could go over and knock off the guy that you thought was threatening you and then leave. People would have bought it. It was the sense of unending, unending unendingness. And when asked what’s the plan and where are we going, we were told we’ll leave some time in the next 50 or 100 years. So it’s a credential question.
The Republican Party traditionally is the Party of strong national defense, especially since the Democrats didn’t want to pick a fight with the Soviet Union and thought that they weren’t a threat, and that has carried on. The challenge is you need to make the case of when we do something in the military. How is that protecting freedom in the United States? And if we’re trying to be social workers, people tire of that and it hurts at the polls. And that was certainly 2006 and part of 2008.
[Audience question: Our problem is that once we get [conservatives] into office, we don’t govern the way we say we’re going to govern. That’s why we don’t hold the majorities and that’s why we don’t hold power. I don’t know if there’s so much anything wrong with our message as conservative Republicans. It’s once we get elected, are we governing like conservatives?]
There are tremendous pressures on any candidate or elected official to govern the forces of state-ism. Ask any elected official that you know, “How many people come to you and say ‘Spend less, do less’?” And how many people who write you and come and visit ask you to go steal other people’s money and give it to them? So the pressures are very strong, and I would argue that this is part of the Conservative Movement, the broad Center-Right Movement.
It is true, people have endoskeletons, that the skeletal system is inside. That’s what mammals do. Okay? Mollusks and lobsters have exoskeletons. That skeleton is on the outside. And sometimes we say to these politicians, “You should have a backbone.” Okay? And that’s fine. But if you put a person down 20,000 leagues under the sea, they get crushed by the pressure. They’ll tell you where your backbone is. You put them down under enough pressure and they get crushed. That’s why people who go underground are in submarines or those big devices that are in effect exoskeletons. We need as a Conservative Movement to be the exoskeleton for elected officials, recognizing that the amount of pressure that’s put on them is not humanly – you can’t expect all of them to stand up to it, because it’s too much pressure. We need to create strength around elected officials, make it easier for people to say no to tax increases and spending increases and more state-ism. It’s not enough to say to someone, “Well, you should be strong enough to stand up to all the whims and pressures of the Left.” They need our help, they need our support. We need to be there. Part of the purpose of the Pledge, the No Tax Increase Pledge, is to be an exoskeleton. If somebody says, we have politicians every day, people come and say, “Raise taxes? I’d love to help you. I took the Pledge. I can’t help you.” As a way of saying, you know, “Lighten up, I can’t do that. Can I do something else for you, get you a cup of coffee?” [Laughter] “But I can’t raise taxes, and you know that I can’t because I’ve taken the Pledge.” So, the pressures, we’re asking people to do something, to go into the middle of the state, and states want more power and want to grow, it’s in their nature, and ask them to go and try and move that in the opposite direction. We ask a lot of elected officials when we ask them to do that. Yes, they should have backbones, but we need to be there as an exoskeleton, a support system to make it easier for them to do the right thing.
[Mr. Norquist also addressed the viability of third parties.]
As Phyllis pointed out, there are two teams, there are two parties. There are some countries in Europe where if you get 2 percent of the vote, you get to choose who the prime minister is. In the United States if you get 2 percent of the vote, you’re officially insane. [Laughter] You may get a radio talk show out of it later, but you don’t get to ride on Air Force One.
So, in terms of electoral politics, there are two teams. Pick one, and if you think your team isn’t doing as well as it should, go to work to improve it.
On the other hand, there are many doors into the broad Center Right Coalition Meeting, and a lot of people have walked in through the Libertarian Party, and that’s cheerful and helpful. That’s kind of Reagan’s entire domestic policy staff at the White House or the other guy on the ballot. [Laughter] Well, a small number of returns. But they wanted to paint on the big screen, and there are people who come through the Constitution Party and others. Those are great avenues.
The Democratic Party is filled with people who want to improve odd Left-of-Center Parties and institutions but play inside the bigger tent of the modern Democratic Party. So I think we should be respectful to people who come in through the Constitution Party or the Libertarian Party, but at the end of the day if they want to change the world in a good way.
A lot of people, Clinton did this and Obama did it, they both talked about change. But they mean a different thing, and Obama has actually said it. He wants to change America. Many people in this country would like to change Washington. We’d like to use America to change Washington. [Applause] Obama wants to use a corrupt Washington and the power of the government to change America. He doesn’t like us. He doesn’t like America as it is. But to change America, he wants the power of the state to change America. We would like to use the power of America and the strengths of America to change Washington, DC. And some of that could get wrapped around the axle because everyone says, “Did they say change?” A lot of people are going, “Yeah, change.” They mean completely different things. We want to change Washington; they want to change America.
[Audience question: I’m curious if you all have any other suggestions about how to motivate people, because once you get them to understand [their impact], they kind of get excited.]
Your point about people getting active for the first time I think is critically important. If you look through American history, once people get involved one time in one issue, it’s so much easier to do it again. The Abolitionist Movement, the same people, the Abolitionist Movement, the Temperance Movement, the drive for women’s right to vote, the same people are doing these things, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement. Once somebody has decided that they got active in politics, they look around, they stay active. People who were involved in Goldwater in the presidential race for the first time looked around and all of sudden they’re available for congressional races and senate races and future presidential races. So, there is some sense in a lot of people’s mind that there’s some sort of you need to get a license or something to get involved in politics and you need to get permission from somebody and you don’t want to embarrass yourself by showing up at the political thing.
So, that’s why I think these rallies that we calculated about 600,000 people plus, that’s a very conservative number at the Tea Party rallies, at over 600 rallies, I’m sure there are ones we missed, but we did the best scan of them all. That’s 600,000 people who went out, took a couple hours out of their day to rally.
What are the fears people have? Public speaking, and so people who organize these rallies got over that. And if you throw a birthday party, they’ll all come to your birthday party. [Laughter] And so some people announce, “We’re going to have a rally at the steps,” and fewer and fewer guys were humiliated, so people got over that fear, too. Now, everyone showed up, at least 600,000 people showed up at rallies. How many people do you think you can get to the next set of rallies? How easy is it to get those 600,000 to do something else in the future?
So, getting people to do it the first time, to learn to ride a bike, to vote, to get involved politically is so huge, because you really train someone for a lifetime of political activism. I mean, it’s all fine and good to teach somebody who’s 80 years old how to play tennis, but if you teach a 20-year-old how to play tennis, they would play tennis for 60 years. And we want to train people to become politically active not just today, not that one phone call, but once they have done that one phone call. And if you win, it’s even more cool because then it’s much more fun to do it again.
The 15 years between June of ’93 and six weeks of the Obama Administration, those 15-plus years, is the longest period in American history without tax increase out of Washington, DC. It’s the only 15 year period in American history without tax increase out of Washington, DC, going back to Jefferson and Washington and all those guys. Because we were able to hold [them to the Taxpayer Pledge], we were able to stop tax increases at the national level.
Once in a while somebody says, “Oh, you shouldn’t be for limited government, you should be for competent government.” You can’t have competent big, fat, bloated government.
[The President] wants to change America. Many people in this country would like to change Washington. We’d like to use America to change Washington. Obama wants to use a corrupt Washington and the power of the government to change America. He doesn’t like us. He doesn’t like America as it is. But to change America, he wants the power of the state to change America.
