(NEW YORK) MintPress — As the Republican National Convention gets underway in Tampa, many think the most powerful person there is a man most voters have never heard of: Grover Norquist, creator of Americans for Tax Reform.
He is an ardent libertarian who believes that Washington is controlling Americans’ lives through the taxes it raises to fund big government.
Since starting the group in 1985, Norquist has persuaded Republican politicians all over the country to sign an oath called the “Taxpayer Protection Pledge,” promising their constituents that they would never again vote for anything that would increase taxes.
Through the pledge, Norquist controls 279 votes, including those of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan as well as both the Speaker of the House, John Boehner, and the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell.
Norquist has a different take. “The tax issue is the most powerful issue in American politics going back to the tea party,” he told 60 Minutes. “People say, ‘Oh, Grover Norquist has power.’ No. Grover Norquist and Americans for Tax Reform focus on the tax issue. The tax issue is a powerful issue.
“I think to win a Republican primary— It is difficult to imagine somebody winning a primary without taking the pledge,” he adds.
Those who refuse to sign the pledge face primary battles against well-funded opponents, backed by Norquist. And if they so sign, there’s no turning back. If someone backslides, his group will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaigning and making sure the public knows about it.
Norquist claims he got the idea to brand the Republican Party as the party that would never raise taxes when he was just 12 years old and volunteering for the Nixon campaign.
Decades later, he has the whole party in his hands.
Gunning for the polls
As powerful as he is, Norquist is hardly the only conservative lobbyist to employ shady tactics to score political victories.
Take Wayne LaPierre, the Executive Vice President and chief political strategist of the National Rifle Association (NRA) for the past 21 years.
Under his guidance, the NRA aggressively lobbies elected officials to oppose any kind of gun control. It also advocates for stand-your-ground laws and offers insurance to members to pay for the legal costs of shooting people in so-called self-defense.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, since 1990, the gun rights lobby has contributed $27.7 million to candidates for Congress and the White House, 86 percent of it to Republicans.
In contrast, the gun control lobby has donated only $1.9 million to politicians, 94 percent of it to Democrats.
LaPierre recently gave a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington in which he said that President Obama was part of a “conspiracy to ensure re-election by lulling gun owners to sleep.”
“All that first term lip service to gun owners is just part of a massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and hide his true intentions to destroy the Second Amendment during his second term.” He also warned that what “gun owners across America have fought to achieve over the past three decades could be lost” if Obama wins a second term.
As far-fetched as this may sound, the NRA has the money and membership (4 million people) to translate these ideas into political clout.
Big business
At the same time, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — one of the most vocal opponents of the Obama administration and congressional Democrats — continues to shell out tens of millions of dollars for its own lobbying expenditures.
The Chamber and the affiliated Institute for Legal Reform spent $55 million on lobbying in the first half of 2012, compared to approximately $31 million for the same period last year, according to recent Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) filings.
Its small army of lobbyists has focused on myriad issues in 2012, including the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, implementation of health care reform, replacing the $109 billion sequestered spending cuts, the Keystone oil pipeline, reform of sugar quotas, customs facilitation and Environmental Protection Agency rules on natural-gas fracking.
The group scored big wins with the passage of Export-Import Bank reauthorization and passage of the National Flood Insurance Program reauthorization.
State action
Meanwhile, the lobbying is not limited to Washington.
In the past year alone, several state legislatures have passed bills making it harder for minorities and low income people to vote as well as mandating ultrasounds for women seeking an abortion.
Behind much of that legislation is a little-known organization called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). It was founded in 1973 by the right-wing activist Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the conservative Heritage Foundation and the Free Congress Foundation think tanks.
Funded by 23 corporations, including Exxon Mobil, AT&T, Coca Cola and Koch Industries, which comprise its “private enterprise board,” ALEC writes and supplies fully drafted bills to state legislators. On its website, it claims that it has more than 1,000 of these bills introduced by legislative members every year, with one in every five of them enacted into law.
According to the Center for Media and Democracy, ALEC has drafted bills that undermine unions, fight against environmental protection, advocate tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy and promote the privatization of public services.
On the national level, the companies involved in ALEC’s private enterprise board have also been rounding up lobbyists to target federal departments like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). ALEC’s publication, “EPA’s Regulatory Train Wreck,” for example, outlines steps lawmakers can take to curtail the power of state regulators.
Not surprisingly, the heads of many of these Fortune 500 leaders attend Grover Norquist’s Wednesday breakfast meetings, which are unofficial strategy sessions.
Explained Norquist: “It’s people from Capitol Hill, House and Senate, think tanks, tea party groups, business groups. Everybody who wants the government to be smaller and everybody who wants the government to leave them alone.”