Bathtubs and Rat Butts

My friend Frank shared an article on Grover Norquist with me in Facebook yesterday. The article, entitled, “Patriotic Millionaires to Grover Norquist: Move to Somalia,” describes how Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform (AFT), met earlier this week with six millionaires representing a group called Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength, whose members each make more than $1 million/year and believe that since America has been good to them, it’s their duty to give back.

Group members are currently making the rounds in Washington to promote a tax increase on the country’s richest Americans from the current rate of 35 percent to 39.6 percent. (The group points out at its website that “letting tax cuts for the top 2% expire as scheduled would pay down the debt by $700 billion over the next 10 years.”)

Grover Norquist

Common ground could not be found with the anti-tax crusader, according to the article. Norquist – who, it’s been said, opposes “any tax increase of any kind at any time” and is therefore a key obstacle to deficit reduction – predictably labeled the millionaires “Democratic Party hacks” and scurried back into the dark hole leading to his dank, putrid lair.

Let’s take a quick look at the guy, shall we?

A Harvard graduate, Norquist founded AFT at the request of St. Ronnie of Reagan, he claims, back in 1985. The group’s infamous anti-tax pledge, which obligates those who sign it to oppose any tax increase without an equal tax cut to offset it, has been signed by 41 U.S. Senators, 236 U.S. House members, ten governors and 1,263 state legislators.

He’s known for having said, “I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Why anybody in Washington listens to a guy who says such irresponsible and immature crap – and means it – is beyond me.

As a teenager, Norquist volunteered on Tricky Dick Nixon’s presidential campaign in 1968 (and as recently as 2003 displayed a Nixon campaign poster above his bed.) He’s worked with Dubya, Newt Gingrich (Norquist co-authored 1994’s yucky Contract with America), Arnold Schwarzenegger and that paragon of virtue known as Karl Rove, has long opposed health care reform and cap and trade proposals, and sits on the boards of the National Rifle Association and the American Conservative Union.

Norquist must have lots of frequent flier miles; he spent time in Afghanistan, Angola and Mozambique organizing anti-communist rebels, visited the tiny African country of Lesotho to promote private-property rights, and has for years traveled all over the United States to promote his narrow ideology.

Jack Abramoff

I learned from reading Matt Taibbi’s Smells Like Dead Elephants, in a chapter entitled, “Meet Mr. Republican: The secret history of the most corrupt man in Washington,” that Norquist is close buddies with disgraced former über-lobbyist and ex-convict Jack Abramoff – who’s currently popping up all over my television on his redemption/book tour, having been released from federal prison last year after serving three and a half years for conspiracy, mail fraud and helping to make Washington the smelly cesspool that it is today. (I wrote about Abramoff back on April 18; see my post entitled, “Casino Jack and Tennessee Whiskey.”)

Ralph Reed

Norquist apparently worked with Abramoff and Ralph Reed – the creepy, unethical, plastic-looking dude who went on to serve as director of the Christian Coalition in the early 1990s – at the College Republicans National Committee (where Abramoff succeeded Norquist as chief). The unscrupulous triumvirate eventually worked together on a number of “almost comic backroom escapades,” as Taibbi calls them, to defraud clients, line their own pockets and lure ethically-challenged politicians into the tangled webs they wove. (According to the U.S. Senate’s Indian Affairs Committee, Americans for Tax Reform allegedly “served as a ‘conduit’ for funds that flowed from Abramoff's tribal clients to surreptitiously finance conservative grassroots lobbying campaigns.”)

A profile in Rolling Stone magazine entitled, “Grover Norquist: The Soul of the New Machine,” written years ago, describes Norquist as presiding over “cold-blooded” policy meetings at Americans for Tax Reform where the common vision was “an America in which the rich will be taxed at the same rates as the poor, where capital is freed from government constraints, where government services are turned over to the free market, where the minimum wage is repealed, unions are made irrelevant, and law-abiding citizens can pack handguns in every state and town.”

"My ideal citizen is the self-employed, homeschooling, IRA-owning guy with a concealed-carry permit," Norquist told the interviewer, “because that person doesn't need the goddamn government for anything."

This scares me.

Grover Norquist is to me another example of what’s wrong with American politics – from what I’ve read, he’s a callous, self-centered, zealous, ultra-conservative opportunist with a narrow perspective who earns a huge paycheck for bending the ears of the powerful.

Few can argue that “drowning government in a bathtub” would be in this country’s best interest.

Thankfully, fewer people seem to give a rat’s behind what Grover Norquist thinks.



Sources: Huffington Post, Rolling Stone magazine, Smells Like Dead Elephants by Matt Taibbi (2007, Black Cat Publishing).