(CITY JOURNAL) — During last summer’s debt-ceiling negotiations, David Brooks of the New York Times wrote that Republicans who rejected “trillions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for a few hundred billion dollars of revenue increases” would reveal themselves as “fanatics” with “no sense of moral decency”—clearly “not fit to govern.” In November, after the failure of the congressional “supercommittee” spawned by the debt-ceiling crisis, the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson made much the same point: bringing the federal debt under control without higher taxes made sense only “in the parallel universe inhabited by GOP ideologues, a place where the laws of arithmetic do not apply.” The problem, according to Robinson, was that among today’s Republicans, “tax cuts are not a matter of policy but of faith.”
This religion, all right-thinkers know, has a leader: Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) since the organization’s founding in 1985. Norquist and ATR are best known for the “Taxpayer Protection Pledge,” which, at the federal level, binds politicians to oppose both higher marginal income-tax rates on individuals and business and “any net reduction or elimination of deductions and credits, unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing tax rates.” In the GOP, only six congressmen and seven senators have not signed the pledge; only three of the 246 elected Democrats on Capitol Hill have signed it. The pledge, Garry Wills thundered in The New York Review of Books, “means that most Republicans in Congress . . . have left behind their consciences in the pocket of Grover Norquist.” Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick has even charged that “the Republican strategy is to drive America to the brink of fiscal ruin and then argue that the only way out is to cut spending for the powerless. Taxes—a dirty word thanks to Norquist’s ‘no new taxes’ gimmick—are made to seem beyond the pale.”
