(MintPress) – John McCarthy once said, “There is only one thing more harmful to society than an elected official forgetting the promises he made in order to get elected; that’s when he doesn’t forget them.” For Republicans, amnesia about one particular promise may be the first step toward bring the party back to prominence.
Last Sunday, on ABC’s “This Week”, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) openly questioned Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform anti-tax pledge, “I agree with Grover, we shouldn’t raise rates, but I think Grover is wrong when it comes to we can’t cap deductions and buy down debt. … I will violate the pledge, long story short, for the good of the country, only if Democrats will do entitlement reform.” On NBC’s “Meet the Press”, Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) added: “A pledge you signed 20 years ago, 18 years ago, is for that Congress. … For instance, if I were in Congress in 1941, I would have signed a declaration of war against Japan. I’m not going to attack Japan today. The world has changed, and the economic situation is different.”
CNN reported that Reps. Peter King (R-N.Y.), Steve LaTourette (R-Ohio) and Scott Rigell (R-Va.) have embraced the position of party leaders John Boehner (R-Ohio), John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Jeb Bush, who have dismissed the pledge and have declared it toxic to the governing process.
This complete reversal comes on the heels of negotiations with Democrats about the upcoming “fiscal cliff”, in which automatic tax hikes and severe cuts to the federal budget will be imposed. It is widely felt that this may trigger another recession, reversing nearly three years of economic growth. Republicans have suggested that they will entertain the notion of tax reform if Democrats will put entitlement cutting on the table.
For more than 20 years, Norquist and his anti-tax raise position has been a platform in Republicans’ national platform, and — as of the previous five years — has been the war call of the tea party. However, in part due to party-line rejections — such as Jeb Bush’s June declaration: “I ran for office three times. …The pledge was presented to me three times. I never signed the pledge. I cut taxes every year I was governor. I don’t believe you outsource your principles and convictions to people.” — Norquist has recently found himself in opposition to the Republican aristocracy.
Bush later added, “Ronald Reagan would have, based on his record of finding accommodation, finding some degree of common ground, as would my dad — they would have a hard time if you define the Republican Party — and I don’t — as having an orthodoxy that doesn’t allow for disagreement, doesn’t allow for finding some common ground…Back to my dad’s time and Ronald Reagan’s time — they got a lot of stuff done with a lot of bipartisan support.”
Norquist would call Bush a traitor for his words, but all of this does pose an interesting question: Have Republicans pulled away from brinkmanship and partisanship in order to return to bipartisanship, compromising and practical governance?
During the previous presidential term, Republicans set the benchmark for a “do-nothing” Congress, opposing the president at nearly every turn. In kind, Republicans received a nearly fatal beating Election Night, being saved only because of redistricting and finding themselves in a chastised party in danger of falling permanently into irrelevance. Some would say that the Republicans’ newly found negotiating spirit is the first step of a new, moderate-leaning Republican Party, but in saying that, the obvious flaw in the argument becomes apparent: How can the Republican Party quickly change directions when it has spent decades getting its believers to groupthink the way that they do?
The problem with Grover Norquist
Until Election Night, Grover Norquist was the undeclared king of the Republican Party. Ninety-five percent of all Congressional Republicans and all but one Republican nominee for president (Jon Huntsman was the exception) have personally signed a promise to him to not raise tax revenue. Since 1985, his organization, Americans for Tax Reform, has steadily reformed the Republican Party away from the compromises his mentor Ronald Reagan made to simplify the tax code and to close abusive loopholes toward an ideologue where anything that raises taxes is automatically wrong.
A co-author of the 1994 Contract with America, he is often seen as the leader of the modern conservative movement. For many, particularly in the tea party, Norquist’s vision of America was the ideal: an America where — in Norquist’s words — the government can “shrink … down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”
Then, Election Night happened, and suddenly, Norquist had no friends.
In a beating no one saw coming, the freshmen tea party class of 2010 was soundly defeated. Of all the tea party-backed candidates that ran in 2012, only four of their 16 Senate candidates were elected or re-elected. The Tea Party Caucus was reduced by more than a quarter, and those who survived, such as caucus head Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) received the scare of their political career. It is yet to be seen if the tea party can survive 2012, but when it came right down to it, the election reopened fault lines within the party that were once thought paved over. The conservative faction felt that an even harder line must be held in regards to taxation, fiscal policy and domestic spending.
But, for the party’s plurality, this election was a wake-up call. The first African-American president was re-elected. Marijuana was legalized in two states. The rape apologists lost. Openly gay and bisexual candidates won. Republicans were denounced by the Latino population by a factor of 3 to 1 and the African-American community 19 to 1. Republicans were only able to hold the House because the party controls the majority of statehouses and was able to carve “safe” districts that will not be potentially contested until the next round of redistricting. Most dauntingly, Republicans have lost the popular vote in five out of the last six presidential elections. Suddenly, for those in the party that seeks power, the party’s platform was threatening to permanently exclude them from a return to prominence.
Norquist’s call for holding a tight line of tax hikes was considered by many to be the first move toward accepted extremism in the modern American political infrastructure — the declaration that this position is non-negotiable, which was readily accepted by the Republican base. The problem lies in the realization that the base is not enough to successfully vie for power. According to Rasmussen Reports polling, 37.6 percent of Americans see themselves as Republicans as of August, compared to the 33.3 percent who are Democrats. However, according to a 2011 Gallup poll, 27 percent of the Republican base see themselves as moderate or liberal. More concerningly, the rising number of uncommitted independents are rising, forcing the Republican elite to consider a very messy reversal toward the political middle. An example of this is the “fiscal cliff” negotiations.
At midnight on New Year’s Day, the sins of the outgoing Congress will drop as the Bush-era tax cuts expire, taxes related to the Affordable Healthcare Act takes effect, the alternative minimum tax rate increases, certain tax breaks for businesses disappear and the automatic spending cuts from the 2011 Budget Control Act make their introductions.
According to Barron’s, more than 1,000 government programs — including Medicare and Defense — will be deeply cut. In response to this unsettling reality, Congress and the president have three possible choices: 1) they can leave everything as is, which would kill economic growth and likely trigger a recession; 2) they can cancel some or all of the scheduled tax increases and spending cuts, which would unbalance the budget, add to the nation’s debt portfolio and bring us one step closer to joining Europe in its debt nightmare; or 3) renegotiate a middle ground that would balance tax hikes with budget cuts, but in a moderate way that would not strangle the economy.
Implementation of the “fiscal cliff” package as it is currently written will raise unemployment by a point and cut the gross domestic product by four points, according to the Congressional Budget Office. As it is written now, the plan will effectively erase the effects of Obama’s stimulus plan and the two years of growth that followed it. There is a definite need for debt reform; publicly-held federal debt currently exceeds 70 percent on the national annual output, which hasn’t been seen since post-World War II restructuring in 1950.
Both House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) have made inroads, suggesting that they will negotiate tax hikes if entitlements are also negotiable. Both gentlemen are now in better positions to deal; in 2011, debt ceiling negotiations were blocked by the tea party. With the tea party silenced — at least, temporarily — the art of governance may actually return to Washington.
The undoing of the cult
This leaves the million-dollar question left to be answered: What does all of this mean about the future of the Republican Party?
Not much, actually.
For decades, Republicans have been polarizing their base, convincing low-knowledge voters to vote against their interests. In doing this, they have created an unfocused organization that sees everyone that is not white and not Protestant as bad; is fearful of things outside the national border (and sometimes, their state border); shuns new ideas and anything that is different; and uses Christianity as a shield and weapon to distract from decidedly non-Christian actions and intentions. In this, a unified, polarized, racist, sexist and xenophobic coalition of the willing formed, from which the tea party was born.
Now, in order to survive, the Republican leadership has to move this cult-like coalition in a completely new direction.
Prior to Election Night, there were cracks in the unity of the Republican Party. Many Republicans have publicly rejected Norquist’s ideology. In 2011, Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) proposed legislation that ended tax earmarks for movie producers and ethanol producers. Norquist argued that this constituted a tax hike, a violation of the pledge. However, 35 of the 41 Senate Republicans still voted for Coburn’s bill.
Yet, under the tea party, Norquist’s pledge drove the nation over the edge — destroying the nation’s perfect credit, raising borrowing costs and polarizing the political climate to degrees never seen before. Fewer bills were passed through this Congress than in any other Congress. This Congress received the lowest approval ratings of any Congress since approval ratings were first measured.
The defeat of the tea party returned some normalcy to the Republican Party, but an upcoming war still awaits between Republican moderates and the conservative camp they “encouraged” to win power. Pushes against immigration, public schools and integration and equal access to the polls have isolated the Republican Party from mainstream America. In order to regain control, somehow, the moderates in the Republican caucus must undo decades of self-entitlement, small-world thinking, a worldview that is rapidly becoming out-of-date and resistant to compromising.
It may be too late for that.
The problem with a cult, or with any religious mechanism in general, is that there is blind adherence with the dogma of the group. From Norquist’s pledge to the issue of abortion, opposition from within the party was met with ostracization and isolation instead of the discussion and negotiation expected in a normal political organization. In such a dogmatic organization, changing “the Scriptures” would destabilize the group, destroy the faith that holds it together and possibly fragment it into more ideologically stringent cells. To allow the Republican Party to split is unthinkable, but to change it after so many years of indoctrination may equally be unthinkable.
It’s a shame — on a side note — that Republicans didn’t pay attention to the other things Norquist was saying; he supports defense budget cutting, pulling out of Afghanistan and is for strengthened Islamic-American ties — as his wife is from an Islamic family. He was one of the few Republicans that opposed the party’s attack on the mosque-in-Manhattan issue; he called the issue “a distraction.”