Republicans are considering a tax hike on the wealthy, and Grover Norquist is beside himself. “It’s an incredibly destructive idea economically, and very foolish politically,” the longtime anti-tax activist told me this week. The concept was once unthinkable in the GOP, yet many Republicans are signaling that the party might just break the first commandment of conservative politics.
Norquist’s opinion used to matter in the Republican Party. Maybe it still does. Before President Donald Trump came along, Norquist was the nation’s most powerful enforcer of GOP orthodoxy, at least when it came to taxes. He is the keeper of the Pledge—the written vow taken by a large majority of Republican officeholders in state and federal government to never back a tax increase. For decades, whenever a GOP member of Congress so much as flirted with the idea, Norquist was there to remind them—and voters—of their promise, and the threat of electoral defeat if they broke it.
In Norquist’s telling, the Pledge has had a perfect record over the past 35 years. “In the House or the Senate, no Republican has voted for a rate increase since 1990,” he told me, referring to the year George H. W. Bush signed a bipartisan budget deal that reneged on his promise to eschew new taxes. But Trump, not Norquist, is now the heavy in GOP politics, a...
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