Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, is a prominent conservative activist. He informally heads up what is known as the “Leave Us Alone Coalition” and works behind the scenes to promote conservative ideas in government.
The Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner spoke with Norquist at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington earlier this month. He gave is perspective on the landscape of 2012 as an election year and discussed the interplay between Congress and the President.
Barack Obama, Norquist said, “was a very good candidate in 2008. He was not a very good president for the first two years, so about a year ago he quit being president and decided to be a candidate again because he knew how to do it better.”
Obama the candidate
With that in mind, he cautioned, in 2012 “you’ve got to quit thinking of him as president. He’s the candidate.”
Norquist pointed out that Obama’s State of the Union Address in January “was a list of things he says he wanted to do,” but, he said, Obama “was president for two years with a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate [and] he didn’t do any of those things.”
Rather than the State of the Union being “a list of things he considers high priorities,” it is, Norquist explained, “a list of things he thinks it will be clever to talk about in his reelection campaign. It’s not a list of things he actually wants to do” because otherwise “he would have done them.”
Thinking of Obama as “trying to govern,” Norquist said, is to “misunderstand what’s going on.”
That is because “last year and this year are campaigning. Everything is a campaign. Nothing is governing.”
Obama’s wish-list
Norquist said that, if Obama had “wanted to govern when he had 59 [or] 60 senators and a solid majority in the House, that’s the time to have done whatever he thought was useful and he did” a few of those things. For instance, Norquist noted, the president pushed through Congress the health-care bill, the Dodd-Frank banking bill, and the stimulus package.
Obama “did all those things,” Norquist said. “The things on his list of things to do, he did; everything he talks about now is that which he didn’t do when he could have” done it, given solid Democratic legislative majorities during the first two years of the Administration.
Looking forward to the presidential election, Norquist predicted that the Republicans are going to nominate a candidate “whose job will be, if he gets elected, to sign the bills that [Speaker of the House John] Boehner and [Senate GOP Leader] Mitch McConnell send him.”
Norquist added that he believes the Republicans will hold the majority in the House of Representatives and take control of the U.S. Senate.
A new GOP majority
The reason, he explained, is that “there are 23 Democratic seats open [and] only ten” open Republican seats. “Half the Democrat seats are vulnerable to Republicans. Some of them are lost already: North Dakota, Nebraska, Montana. And many of them that you wouldn’t think of as open to Republican challenge – Hawaii, New Jersey, New Mexico – [are] all possible because of candidate choices good on our side, bad on their side.”
As a result of these political conditions, Norquist reiterated, “we should have a Republican House and Senate in 2013. The big fight now is [to] pick a Republican to get across the finish line and all we need him to do is sign the bills.”
Norquist emphasized that regardless of the Republican presidential nominee, if he wins the election, he will need the cooperation – and the leadership – of Congress to get any of his initiatives passed into law.
“Let’s say that secretly Newt [Gingrich] really does want to put people on the moon,” he mused. “Do you really think Boehner’s going to pass a bill to let him do that? Do you really think Mitch McConnell going to do that?”
Offering another example, he said, “Maybe [Rick] Santorum secretly wants to go back to earmarks. That’s not happening, even if the President wanted to.”
Looking at a third example, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, Norquist asked if “Romneycare” were “still a good idea, who is going to send you a bill to do that?”
‘Read the Teleprompter’
Using blunt language, he said that “what we need is a Republican president to do what Obama did: get his butt elected and then sit there and look pretty and read the Teleprompter.”
To illustrate what he meant, Norquist added that “Obama’s made two decisions since he was president: to triple the number of troops in Afghanistan and to involve us in the war in Libya.”
Everything else, he said, “was handed to him by [Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid and [former Speaker of the House Nancy] Pelosi.”
As Norquist put it, “Reid and Pelosi said [to Obama], ‘Here’s the stimulus package. Sign it. Here’s our banking regulation bill. Sign it. Here’s the health care bill. Sign it. Here’s the vast expansion of domestic discretionary spending [in] the budget. Sign it.”
None of these bills, he explained, were Obama’s own ideas.
In part two of this interview, Grover Norquist explains how Congress and the President interact and why each of the Republican presidential candidates has led in the polls at least once.
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