The Ricochet Podcast - Live From CPAC #8: Grover Norquist

Episode Date: February 27, 2015

Live from CPAC 2015, Jay Nordlinger interviews founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist. Source

This is Jay Nordlund. You're at CPAC for National Review and Ricochet. And I'm sitting here with Grover. Now, there are some people known by first name only. Newt, Cher, a lot of America knows Grover Norquist as Grover. Pleasure to be with you. Good to be with you. Even the Kardashians, you have to give a first name. Yeah. Just Kim won't do it. That's so true. Everyone knows Grover. Maybe the most famous Grover since Cleveland. Yes. Well, anyway, there are not too many. The competition is a little light.

No, it's a distinguished name. Well, Grover Northquist is what? He is an expert on politics. He's an expert on economics. He is an expert, and he is informed to the gills. And we spend a lot of our time talking about Republicans and intra-right fights. Let's talk about the Democrats for a quick set, Grover. It's hard for me to believe that the Democratic Party has an open presidential nomination, and it's just so hard for me to believe they're going to hand it to somebody instead of having a big old competition. Go ahead.

Well, let me suggest that I believe that Governor Brown of California will step in and knock her head off. So I think we'll be running against Governor Brown. But if for some reason that doesn't happen, because I think he comes across younger looking and younger acting than she does, even though he's a few years older. And he starts with an entire state of his own, and he doesn't have all her baggage. But that said, if he doesn't do that, she will be the nominee, and you're right, she's going to be handed it. I think what it tells us about is the lack of a bench.

It cost them in 10 and 12 and 14 when they lost governorships and statewide offices. I was just talking to somebody in Ohio that said there isn't somebody in the Democratic Party who could run statewide younger than 70 and older than 30. In Ohio? In Ohio. Interesting. Statewide. They have no elected Democrats statewide and none who could

run for governor or secretary of state credibly or senator. Strickland's over 70. He's looking to be the Senate candidate. And there are a couple of would-be mayors who are not yet in their 30s who are looking to run. 40 years wiped out with very little in the way of serious candidates. I mean, some self-under could show up, but nobody with name ID and a track record in government. The Ds have that. I mean, look around. It's not like there are 12 guys or 10 guys or 4 guys

who could run a national campaign who've decided to pass because Hillary's so powerful. Do you think Elizabeth Warren could win the nomination? I don't. I think people have fun talking about that, but she is the favorite of a handful of intellectuals and hard left activists. Unless she convinced organized labor to flip, what beat Hillary in the last time around was the African-American vote, which had been a solid Clinton building block, was taken away. And her edifice that she'd built collapsed. If you took organized labor away from her, that would do it.

I just don't see that happening. Is it even worth raising the name Martin O'Malley? Martin O'Malley was going to run. He was going to be the Elizabeth Warren who won twice in a blue state. I always wondered what he was doing because he was always out first with the most left-wing position earliest on gay rights to taxing millionaires. If it was written about in Mother Jones, he was passing it as a law in Maryland, gun control and so on, in order to be the candidate of the left who was a governor. However, on his way out, the fellow Brown, his lieutenant governor, who was trying to replace him, the Republican Hogan, won in blue, deep blue Maryland.

I think that was maybe the most stunning thing in all of 2014 for me. It crushes O'Malley's capacity to run because he actually lost that third race. They weren't running against Brown. They were running against O'Malley in Maryland. He gets it by association. Yeah. Well, they were running against his policies.

Well, on the Republican side, presidentially, are you unattached, so to speak? Yes. Are you an independent operator? Yes. My position as head of Americans for tax reform is as long as everybody takes the pledge, I'll be neutral. I talk to all of them. I'm in some capacity advising each of the campaigns or working with them, and my staff works with them.

I've had events for many of them to introduce them to people. Will you do a little handicapping? You don't need any questions from me. Would you do a little handicapping for You don't need any questions from me. Would you do a little handicapping for us? Strengths and weaknesses, comments? Just go down the list mentally. You know them. Yeah, there are six people who are either on stage now or half a step off stage.

And they have the name ID and the ability to raise money and a track record, a narrative, that would justify staying in the race as long as they choose to. They can't get pushed off the stage or laughed off the stage. Going around counterclockwise, Chris Christie, competent governor, never signed a tax increase, vetoed a bunch of tax increases, allowed a bunch of tax increases to lapse, took $130 billion out of the state unfunded pension liability

with an overwhelmingly de-legislature working with him. Go over to Scott Walker. Is Christie a good politician, canny politician? I think so. I mean, he's twice elected in a blue state. He did not run as a liberal. He's a pro-life, conservative, Reagan Republican whose accomplishments are largely Reagan-esque. Now, is he able to pass legislation the way Rick Perry was able to in Texas? No, he has a Democratic legislature.

But given the lay of the land and given it's New Jersey, he has both governed well beyond expectations, beyond what you'd expect, beyond what previous Republican governors have ever done in that state. And he made Walker possible because he showed you on YouTube that you can look at the teachers' union and shout them down without anyone credibly saying you're anti-teacher or anti-education. And politicians who wanted to be for school choice and for fighting the teachers' unions have always felt that if they fought with a teacher union, they would be labeled, smeared, destroyed as anti-teacher, anti-education. And he said, no, that's not true. So I think he's the first of the six. Go to Walker. Walker took that knowledge and lived it with a Republican legislature that allowed him to pass Act 10.

So he did fight the union bosses. He fought the problems that union bring, never fought the workers, always fought the structure and the union abuses. He cut taxes. He passed concealed carry for the Second Amendment people for the first time in the worst gun state in the nation, Wisconsin. Worst gun laws, now some of the best gun laws. Expanded school choice, which had already started there. And Act 10 changed the nature of the state. At least 88,000 union members who used to pay $1,000 in dues average are no longer paying those dues. The Democrats are down about a hundred million dollars a year in

labor union cash for the last four years and indefinitely into the future. Such good news. So that's number two of six. Number three. Perry of Texas, longest running, solid Reagan Republican governor, always pushing in the right direction. When he's not taking pain medicine, he's quite articulate. I thought he was going to win for sure in 12, but he had the back problems. You thought he was going to win the nomination. Did you believe he would win the general? Yes. I thought he would crush him. Okay. We nominated the one guy who could not use Obamacare as a negative against Obama. We've

defeated 14 Democratic senators with only one vote because we didn't let them vote on anything else. So we have 14 times we didn't let them vote on anything else. So we have 14 times we beat people because of Obamacare. We weren't able to use that in the reelection for Obama because Romney had done something that was much too similar. I believe that Perry would have. I go to Jindal next. Jindal has taken a blue state and turned it red. He passed an ethics law that they'd be proud of in Minnesota.

He cut taxes. He did school choice. 380,000 people have the option of a $5,000 voucher to take anywhere they want, public or private. He has dramatically reformed that state. It will never turn blue again for a generation. So does he want to be president? Is he angling for a vice presidential nomination? Should we consider him in the presidential tier? I would, partly because he's an Indian American, the wealthiest ethnic group in the country, per capita. And I think he'll be able to raise the resources. He's also out of Louisiana, and there's financial support that would keep him in the race.

He's brilliant, and if this is going to be about Obamacare, he's probably the best position to be the anti-Obamacare candidate. He's like a staffer as well as the officeholder. Correct. Now, if he didn't get to be president, he would be the obvious HHS secretary or vice presidential nominee as well. That's number four. Number five. Jeb Bush, who three months ago was never going to run for anything for the rest of his life

and hasn't run for office since 2002, and it kind of shows. All of his political judgment and political understanding and training is pre-Tea Party. And he can't even turn to his brother or his dad to ask about what's it like out there because they're pre-Tea Party. And he can't even turn to his brother or his dad to ask about what's it like out there because they're pre-Tea Party. The Tea Party came in and said, you're right, we're never raising taxes. But that's step one. Step two is spending. And they forced the Republican House and Senate to decide that earmarks were not a sign of virility, which is what they used to be, a sign of how powerful you were as a person in Washington, that you had earmarks. Now it's like farting at the dinner table.

It's not to be done. Tea Party did that. Spending. We got the sequester, which was a radical spending cap, permanent spending cap for 10 years, all because the Tea Party stiffened the anti-spending spine of the modern Republican Party. That all predates Bush and his accomplishments. He was a good governor for eight years. He was a cutting-edge governor 12 to 16 years ago.

The issues have moved on. He's got to go back, run ahead, and pick those up. That said, he has name ID. He entered as a top-tier candidate with name ID and fundraising capacity, and he has a narrative, if he can update it, that makes him competitive. He has name ID. He entered as a top-tier candidate with name ID and fundraising capacity. And he has a narrative, if he can update it, that makes him competitive. The last one is Ron Paul, the only senator I put on the list because... Rand Paul. Rand Paul. I'm sorry.

His negative is people think he's his dad. But he's actually much more sophisticated than that. But Rand Paul defeated the perfect candidate for Senate, Trey Grayson. I liked Trey Grayson. He's a friend of mine. I thought he was going to win. And Rand just went right through him in a purplish state over the objections of the Republican leader who was for Trey Grayson. He has now worked well with the other children in the Senate. He is both a radical, low government, limited government guy,

and gets along well with the other senators, which not everybody can do. It's tough to be radical and a loner and out front and still have camaraderie with the other senators because you're sort of living and talking in a different zone than they are sometimes. And that reminds me, are you excluding Ted Cruz? From the list of six. I think one or two could jump on stage with the six, but right now Ted Cruz is challenged. He's a senator. Beg your pardon?

He's a senator. Ted Cruz is a senator. He can't do what Scott Walker is doing this week, which is pass right to work in your state. And the amount of press that Walker will get when the House joins the Senate, which passed it yesterday, and then he signs it, he'll have another several days of coverage.

Then Walker will go and he's going to reform the university system like Act 10 did, liberalizing the make work rules and the labor union rules. And that'll be a week's worth of news. More if the university professors fight him, the way the unions made Walker by putting

tens of thousands of people around the state capitol and trashing it and threatening his life and all that interesting stuff. They raised his visibility. If they'd quietly lost in Wisconsin, it'd have been less painful for them and less helpful to Walker's name ID. So Cruz's challenge, and Rubio's also, both solid Reagan Republicans, both will be fine presidents, both will be presidents someday. The challenge this time is that Rubio's got a major fundraiser vacuum cleaner in his home state named Bush, and Cruz has the same vacuum cleaner in the governor, Perry,

and also, interestingly, with Texas, Rand Paul, competing with the same people who contributed to him. And Jeff also, I imagine, has connections to Texas money. You can imagine, yes, yes, quite correct. And he has been in there to do that. So I think it makes it tougher. Plus, those senators have not yet shown the capacity that Rand has to give a speech, make the news for several days, and move the Republican Party on an issue like drones or criminal justice reform with a speech the way governors are able to do, but senators rarely do.

Well, we've got two more. Sure. Is net neutrality bad? They picked the term net neutrality because neutrality sounds good. Yes. What it really means is the nationalization of cable and Internet capacity because then the government will decide what goes through it. Thank you very much, AT&T and Comcast and other people,

for spending literally trillions of dollars to build these networks. We will now run them for you. If you allow something to be privately owned but run by the government, that's the word that begins with an F. And what they're trying to do is, in effect, nationalize... One of the F-words. Yes. One of the F-words. The more dangerous one, actually, throughout history. It's to nationalize control, have the federal government take over control of what can go through in terms of, eventually, content. Because if you control how quickly something goes through,

you can have that control. The way they're doing it, they originally wanted to pass some laws and Congress wouldn't do it. They're now deciding they're going to deem the Internet and cable and perhaps satellite as a, by definition, as a public utility, like the water company. And a whole series of taxes attached, state, local, federal taxation fees attached to anything that's a public utility. It's about $16 billion, according to the PPI, which is a liberal group. Yeah, it's a tax increase.

It's extremely dangerous. So there are taxes. It's very bad. Net neutrality means, yeah. Net new taxes as implemented. There are different ways to get there, and there are different ways to define it. What the Obama administration is doing that they call net neutrality is actually claiming that privately constructed, privately owned,

and competitive cable companies are a public utility monopoly and will be regulated and taxed that way. Got it. Got it. This question, it may be, Bill Buckley sometimes said, that question is like Peking duck requires 24 hours notice. But I wanted to ask you, who are your favorite politicians? And let's say living and practicing. Now, I know favorite is a murky word because you can like people personally.

Maybe I should ask, you know, whom do you most admire? But who are your four or five favorite politicians? Sure. And we'll stipulate that it's not an unabridged list. It's just you may think of one five minutes later. Sure. Let me start with the governor of Kansas. Brownback?

Brownback. And he has done two things that are the model for all other Republican governors, and that's why the New York Times is having a hissy fit and trashing him. The first was he gets elected and discovers, sees that there are 40 members of the state Senate. Only nine of them are Democrats, but there are 13 Republicans that are Lincoln Republicans, meaning they're Republicans because Lincoln was in 1961, and they were with the North, so they're Republicans.

In 1861. I'm sorry, yes, yes. I went to public school, sorry. 1861. Yeah, me too. But the History Channel tells me 1861. So they're not good on taxes, they're not good on spending. They're literally content-free Republicans. They're Republicans because they're with the North in the Civil War.

It's a heritage. It's a heritage. For some Democrats who agreed with Reagan on everything and voted for McGovern because Sherman had been unkind to Atlanta recently. But they're Northerners who behave the same way, particularly in Kansas. So what happened there is he went and primaried 13. The Republican governor and the Chamber of Commerce primaried 13 sitting Republicans. Two of them quit. They beat nine of the 11 left. Two survived. One is sued

for peace. The other sits in a corner and drools. And so he has a Reagan Republican majority that he crafted. The business community helped him. They didn't run crackpots to make a point. They ran people who you'd want in the legislature if you were designing it from the beginning. So they ran serious candidates who won the primaries and the general. He then turned around and said, here's what we're going to do. We're going to phase out the income tax. Every time spending goes up more than 2%, the income tax will ratchet down to spend that additional resources. So there's a cap on spending in Kansas, 2% a year growth from now on, including inflation, okay, 2%. If inflation is 3%, it's 2%. So that means that over time,

the income tax, individual corporate income tax, will phase out completely to zero. They don't have to pass another law. They don't have to have another vote. It's automatic. There's a spending cap, and it goes to zero. Governor of Maine has already announced that's his top priority to do the same thing. Louisiana's looking at doing this. North Carolina's looking at doing this.

Arizona's looking at doing this. He is the model for phasing out the income tax without blood on the floor. They're going to attack him. They're going to push him. The economy's been so bad that, you know, the revenue's not coming in right now. But over time, it will, and they'll be at zero. And Kansas will be the leader and the model for it. But first, and the way he got that, was a willingness to primary sitting Republicans who are not Reagan Republicans.

This was not ideological purity. You're wrong on one thing. This was not the governor doesn't like you personally. This was not you won't do what I want in some personal capacity. They weren't even in the zone of Reagan Republicans, and he called them out. If other governors would do that, we could have significantly more progress state by state. I know you have to go, but I want to ask you this before. You mentioned the Chamber of Commerce in connection with Brownback. Yeah. I've noticed a couple of

changes in my lifetime. Establishment was a big epithet on the left when I was growing up. Now, I hear it almost exclusively from the right. Also, Chamber of Commerce, when I was growing up, was a terrible epithet on the left. They sneered at Chamber of Commerce and business and all that stuff. Now I hear it as an epithet on the right. The Chamber of Commerce and the establishment have been slower to shift to a Reagan Republican worldview and the broad center-right than other institutions. And the Chamber of Commerce in Florida might as well be the Tea Party or Americans for Tax Reform. The Chamber of Commerce in Kansas, the Chamber of Commerce in Wisconsin,

you have some very good Chamber of Commerce in Louisiana. You have some very strong chambers. That is shifting. Give it 10 years and Chamber of Commerce will be up there with, you know, Koch brothers as engines of positive free market change. But particularly at the local level, the Chamber of Commerce is the establishment. They're the taxi commission, and they fight Uber. Now, eventually, Uber will elect new members of the local Chamber of Commerce, and the Chamber of Commerce will become pro-growth and dynamic. That, in process, hasn't happened yet. Well said. Ladies and gentlemen, I am Jay Nordlinger at CPAC for NR and Ricochet. You can call him Grover.

He's Grover Norquist. Thank you very much. Good to be with you. Thank you. Thanks so much. Ricochet. Join the conversation.