Should President Donald Trump win the election, Norquist is hopeful that Republicans can tame the bureaucracy in a way he couldn’t last time. Should Vice President Kamala Harris win, Norquist thinks that who she puts in her administration is almost irrelevant. “They’ll bring in somebody who looks like a grandmother and governs like a radical,” he said.
“The list of people Kamala Harris will put in the cabinet has already been written by the AFL-CIO and the trial lawyers and the big city mayors and the Black Caucus and just all the guys just sit around and go, ‘we own a piece of this corporation because we we put in so much money and that we want this much payout,’” he said.
Europe is the Democrats’ model, he said. “They want everybody to be unionized, everybody to be the same, and everybody to take instructions from the government, and everyone will go to little French universities and get to learn how to be an aristocrat, or at least a bureaucrat. If they had to throw somebody down the stairs to get the vote,” he said.
One of the most polarizing figures in the current administration is Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chairwoman Lina Khan. While Mark Cuban recently told the Reporter that “it is time to move on” from Khan, some Republicans have warmed up to her — a move that Norquist cautions is a “huge mistake.”
Khan “is trying to undo the biggest success conservatives had in the intellectual world, which was the movement to say that all antitrust has to start with the consumer welfare standard. You have to show some consumers suffer,” he said. “Now, Lina Khan is going into this and she doesn’t care about welfare. She doesn’t even care about structure. She wants you to have racial discrimination as part of what you do, the racial quotas. She said she wants to be able to go after people for that on antitrust; she wants it to be ‘beat up on any business that you want.’”
While Norquist “understand[s] the impulse” by some on the right to attack “woke” corporations, he’s concerned about “giv[ing] the state power to beat up on any company for any reason.” Such a policy, however, is “going from [having] to convict somebody of a crime to put them in prison, to say[ing] you can put anywhere to prison if you want; there doesn’t have to be a crime, there doesn’t have to be harm. And for Republicans, to even flirt with that is a huge mistake.”
Norquist’s prescription for conservatives is simple: “We win if the government is neutral,” he said. “Why would we ever ask for anything other than neutrality?”
2024 has been a busy year for Norquist and his group; the Reporter has covered several of their ad campaigns. But through it all, the bespectacled foe of all tax increases found the time to go to Burning Man once again.
Below is a transcript of our interview with Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, lightly edited for clarity.
Washington Reporter:
Grover, thanks so much for talking with us today. Tell us: what are the stakes of this election?
Grover Norquist:
If the Democrats win the House, Senate, and presidency, even narrowly, they have a discipline we don’t have. There is no equivalent of organized labor, trial lawyers, big city political machines, whoever sees himself as leader of the black crowd in a district, sitting around Matt Gaetz or around Marjorie Taylor Greene; they just do whatever they want. There’s no D capable of doing that. You have two senators who basically left town, 2 Democrat senators who were not always there, except West Virginia always came to and always gave them what they want, which is why he couldn’t get reelected. I don’t know how Kyrsten Sinema, whether she could have been run as an R or something, but she’s gone, and everybody else is in discipline. Everybody voted for the PRO Act. Everybody agreed to the PRO Act, that’s the most radical collection of things you could ever want, even though nobody’s read it. They were told, the coalition says ‘you’ll support this.’ They said ‘I’m in, okay.’ The coalition says that teachers unions should be able to take people away from their parents and cut off their private parts. ‘Okay, fine. Why?’ They said, ‘the teachers union wanted it.’ The last time the other team came in and changed the rules was in 1932. This is who runs the Senate, this is who runs the House.
Washington Reporter:
Do you have this chart tattooed on you?
Grover Norquist:
Just about. It explains why the left is going nuts. They’ve never lived with this. This is ‘Democracy,’ when Democrats run everything. Sometimes Republicans get to veto things, until they go and then we passed them, and then they veto things. The President would slow us down, but never stop us, and never get us to back up, for crying out loud. This is just one way of thinking. Only thing I can imagine that came closest was when they passed Right to Work over the President’s veto, and the solid South didn’t stay with the Democrats on that one. But otherwise remember, this is 80 percent Democrat House and Senate, 70 percent when you did Great Society, 80 percent New Deal. Now, when did Republicans have 60 percent of that? They barely had a majority twice here, okay? They had like, three or four vote majority here. They never had 60 votes to break a filibuster. They never had anything close to 60 votes, but on majority-rule stuff, like taxes and spending and reconciliation, they did have what they need.
And then Democrats are stupid enough to get rid of filibuster for judges when they thought that they were going to run the place forever. The Ds want to go back to this. So if they win, they will add three or four people to the Supreme Court, and all of the rulings they want on labor law will go their way, and on tort law and on power of cities versus states, or the federal government versus states, everything they want is available with no restriction, and the First Amendment is out, they just decided they don’t like that, then they would add three or four states to give themselves six or eight new senators. You could do D.C. I thought they couldn’t do D.C. because D.C. is set up as the District of Columbia federal city. But remember, we gave a sliver of it to Virginia. They didn’t get rid of D.C. D.C is there. They just didn’t have to have all of it. So you could take Northwest or Anacostia, turn that into D.C., and the part of it that’s the District of Columbia, would be the Mall, and everything else would be two Democrat senators. You could do Guam. You could do Puerto Rico, even though the Puerto Ricans say they don’t want it, they don’t care. So they would make the Senate very difficult. They would change labor law, the PRO Act. They would end right to work, which abolishes independent contractors, which means no Uber, no Lyft, no independent truckers. Everybody’s a Teamster. They would double the amount of money they could raise through forced unionization, which is already the bulk of the cash that they get. They will change the rules to do this to us, and they have to, and there’ll be no debating it, because they are terrified by this. This is fascism. This is this is democracy. We win all the time, more slowly than we wanted, maybe, but we win, always moving in that direction. This is steps backwards. History does not allow steps backwards from history. And they’ve also decided that they don’t want to turn us into East Germany anymore. When I was in college, the communists on campus, the guys I went to school with, they wanted us to be East Germany. They literally wanted Soviet Union to win the Cold War. They hated China because they grew up with Soviet Union. But when the Soviet Union disappointed them by losing, they said, w’e don’t want those losers.’ Even Trump doesn’t like that, because they’re losers. For the communists in America, there was China briefly, but then there was nothing else. The really hardcore communists went with Albania for a while, and then the Peruvian terrorist group, Shining Path, that’s the only standing communist group. Now, their new model is Europe. They want to listen to Europe. They want everybody to be unionized, everybody to be the same, and everybody to take instructions from the government, and everyone will go to little French universities and get to learn how to be an aristocrat, or at least a bureaucrat. So you make a good living. You don’t have to work very hard, and you get to run everyone’s lives, so it’s like being a European aristocrat, a French aristocrat before the Revolution. So they’re reestablishing an aristocracy in Europe. You’ve got it in France and many of the other places. These people are better than everyone else, and they tell everyone what to do, and they agree. They want that for us. They don’t have the First Amendment, they don’t have a lot of things. They don’t have the Second Amendment. They can do things that we can’t, but their model is Europe, and that’s why they’ve got unanimity. They don’t have to defend the Soviet Union anymore and that kind of stuff. That’s tough to do, but they think they can defend France. The President of France was out just two weeks ago saying that we all have different skills. You guys in America invent a lot of stuff. We’re very good at regulating. So the European Union will regulate Americans, which is their model, which is to say they could, if they win the House, Senate, presidency, and would, do this. If they had to throw somebody down the stairs to get the vote, they would. because this is so important, to them. For them, the worst part is that at the state level, every year, things keep getting worse, because these guys are cutting taxes and doing school choice and better labor law. And people leave the blue states and they move to the red states, and at first the money gets sent there, and there is investment to build factories and jobs. And then the people move too. And after a while, we won’t need any blue states to win the Electoral College vote, because there won’t be that many people in California and New York.
Washington Reporter:
They are trying to imitate Europe already with Janet Yellen, if she had her druthers, pushing for things like the global minimum tax. Why would that harm American innovation?
Grover Norquist:
Well, for the same reason why conservatives are flourishing. Republicans, Reagan Republicans, are flourishing in the 50 states. You can take a good idea and pass it in one state. Arizona has been passing a whole bunch of legislation. It ends up in 30 other states, whereas in allowing people to move from state to state with their license and not have to to reup it. Concealed carry, shall issue concealed carry, and then permitless carry, constitutional carry, all of these things started in little states and worked. Then there are more states and more states. 1986 is when the first state with stoplights, Florida passed concealed carry, shall issue. And then that worked, and nobody died. And then around 44 states passed it. Then the Supreme Court came and said, ‘yeah, everybody gets this.’ On another note, 10 states have done education savings accounts, and Texas is going to this year, Tennessee is going to do it this year, South Carolina is going to go fix theirs. The state Supreme Court, screwed it up, they are going to fix it. Eventually, all the red states both will have education savings accounts, and then more people will move there. We need competition and the Democrats realize that they can’t have a high state income tax. The Europeans can’t have high taxes in Europe, high corporate taxes, high individual taxes, if money can move to other states. That’s why they first went after Liechtenstein and Switzerland and Seychelles and the Cayman Islands and stuff like that. To them, we’re much more dangerous than those guys. They can’t handle the quantities cash that we can, so they have to stop the competition, and the Democrats are trying to sign up for that. And that’s why we’ve been urging the Republicans and Trump to say not 15 percent. I take the corporate tax rate from 21 not to 15 percent. They’ve been saying 15. The reason you want to say 15 is that’s the European number. And if we go to 15, the Europeans are going ‘see, they agreed, they’ve signed up to our plan.’ We need 14.9 percent.
Washington Reporter:
You want a 14.9 percent rate just symbolically to be lower, not because that 0.1 percent is going to be the deal breaker.
Grover Norquist:
Yes. I wanted 14 percent, and Phil Gramm goes, ‘no, I’ve done all my numbers on 15.’ We can live at 14.9 because it just has to be under 15. And Newt Gingrich goes, ‘nobody understands 14.9, it has to be 14.’ So it’s somewhere between 14 and 14.9 and Trump wants round numbers.
Washington Reporter:
When you look at the map in 2024, how do you choose where you want to go in to make your resources go as far as they can?
Grover Norquist:
As long as the Democrats were in charge of Congress, and even, frankly, the last six years, because after the Republicans lost Congress under Trump, it’s fine to talk to the administration, but it didn’t do any good. With a couple of executive orders, sort of things, we almost got the indexation of capital gains done by executive order. We were this close, and we may yet do it that way if Trump wins but gets frustrated at all, he can always do that in a day’s executive order. And then you basically drop the capital gains tax by 40 percent because 40 percent of most capital gains is inflation over time. Not stuff that people hold, but the stuff that people hold for a long time, like land and houses, and therefore, one case and IRAs, it’s a 40 percent cut the rate, that’s huge, and it protects everybody against inflation going after them. That was one that we worked on then, but mostly we went out to the states, and this is where the efforts to phase the income taxes are focused. Our friends in North Carolina really started it 12 years ago, very cautiously, very quietly, temperedly, after Kansas was seen as getting over their ski tips, there are other parts of that story. They had a Supreme Court that came in and said, ‘you’ve got to spend half a billion dollars more.’ And then they go, ‘oh, you guys are idiots.’ What was a mistake was that they should have opposed the Supreme Court, which is what the governor, Sam Brownback, told me he was going to do. They said it’s not good law, but we’re still going to do it. So every year we weren’t funding education as much as promised, as much as required by law, all nonsense. But anyway, that screwed us up for a while. So North Carolina has been very careful. So for 12 years, they’ve been phasing theirs down. Iowa came in about five years ago, and they’re down half of corporate and individual. West Virginia and Kentucky are both en route to zero. They passed the laws. North Carolina is down to 2.5, Arizona is down to 2.5, Louisiana has announced their plans just this year to do that. Arkansas is phasing down to zero. Oklahoma, the governor was good. The House was good, the Senate leader was bad. They primaried defeated the Senate Leader. They got a new Senate Leader. They’re going to start this process.
Washington Reporter:
What is the Republican opposition to doing this?
Grover Norquist:
Oklahoma, for example, is so overwhelmingly Republican now that Democrats run as Republicans. So Democrats running as Republicans getting elected to office, then turn around and are Democrats. We have Wallace Democrats. The South used to be have conservative Democrats, which was that they had three guns, and they went to church from time to time. And the idea that they would cut taxes, ‘well, then I have less money to get my friends.’ Those people are operating on God’s term limits, so they’re busy dying. In Mississippi, the problem person is a Democrat who’s pretending to be a Republican. That was the problem in Oklahoma, and they beat him. Louisiana is now all in with the new governor there and Georgia had a problem State Senator for the longest time, the guy who beat Ralph Reed when he was running for lieutenant governor. First of all, we worked with North Carolina to get them to do it in the right way. They were doing it the wrong way. ‘We’ll take it and move it all over to the sales tax.’ That buys you more enemies than friends, and then a jam, and nothing happens. That’s what happened when they tried it Louisiana, many years ago. That’s what happened when they tried it in Arizona many years ago. People hate the sales tax. Art Laffer says ‘you should move it to the sales tax.’ But yes, if you’re an economist without an election, designing something, yes, but why would you say, ‘let’s move it to the sales tax,’ rather than, ‘let’s phase it out without replacement.’ In North Carolina, they’ve raised more revenue every year in the last 12 years with a cut just about every year, it cuts in automatically, and yet the government has more money now. Why does Florida have no income tax, and New York has an income tax? Florida actually has more people than New York, two, three million more. But who would have thought this would happen? Years ago, Florida was a big pasture place, the fourth largest cattle state in the nation. I don’t think that’s still true, because now they put houses where they cattle. But Florida spends around $115 billion a year. New York spends $230 billion, exactly twice as much. Florida spends half as much as New York. So New York spends twice as much per capita, twice as much or twice as much per capita, and what they get for that is the same roads, the same education, or worse, but they do get more bureaucrats, more pensions for bureaucrats, more benefits for bureaucrats, more time off for bureaucrats. That’s your French aristocracy, all those heavily paid government workers, who know perfectly well that nobody in the private sector has a pension like that. You get the summer off if you’re a teacher’s union person. I look at the days my kids won’t be in school. This is a something day, which means we’re not going to work, and the kids aren’t allowed to show up, so we pretend that we’ll do something in the office. But who checks? Because the kids aren’t there. That’s what we want. I don’t want to shift the sales tax and spend just as much money. Some might say ‘it’ll be more pro-growth.’ You know what’s even more pro-growth? Just getting rid of the income tax and not having a sales tax, higher sales tax. Nobody’s doing it the old way. Everybody’s doing it with triggers. These are back door spending limits. Everyone talks about cutting the income tax. What you’re really doing is you’ve got a spending limit. Revenue comes up. You keep taking the rate down to keep you under the spending level.
Washington Reporter:
In many ways, Illinois is the opposite of what you’d like to see. But interestingly, they elected tons of Democrats in 2022 while simultaneously rejecting a ballot initiative to move to a progressive income tax rate.What do you make of that?
Grover Norquist:
It shows us the power of the single rate tax, the flat rate tax. In Massachusetts, we lost 51-49 and they went to a graduate income tax, two rates, one very high, one more regular. But for decades they had five times they went after taking it to a graduated level. It was defeated each time. I don’t know what they were thinking, but the business community did not fight it, and it only lost by one point. So if in deep blue Massachusetts, where everybody’s supposed to be for a graduated income tax, except not for them, and again, these are not just the people are going to get hit by that. That was going to hit a couple percentage of population year one that eventually they’ll get to everybody, but they all realize this is the beginning of them coming for me, with higher taxes. Yes, they get the rich first, but then they will get to me. In Illinois, you had all these liberal Democrats who said, ‘oh yeah, we’re progressive stuff, but not here, not where I live.’ Watch Washington state, where on the ballot, the conservatives there, the guys who run the center right meeting that we work with, run something called Project 42 and Project 42 is 42nd state they ran several initiative this year. Three of them the legislature said, we give up and passed it. One says, the law said in Seattle, you can’t chase the criminal, because somebody might get hurt if you chase them. So they would steal cars and then steal stuff and then drive away.
Washington Reporter:
This was ban on law enforcement chasing criminals? Wow, even crazier than I thought.
Grover Norquist:
And so that the law. Now they also had one that says, to reiterate, our that we’re never having an income tax, that passed. But there’s another one to appeal the capital gains tax. They passed it, arguing it’s not an income tax because the court said it’s an excise tax. Very left wing court. Previous courts had all ruled that’s an income tax and youan’t do that, so this time they did. But watch Washington state, because it’s single zero is a flat rate tax. It’s the best flat rate, best flat tax. But the reason I like the flat rate taxes, it’s so easy to cut. You go, we’re going from four to three and a half. Okay? And when the left goes, ‘what about the billionaires?’ Well, we’re all going from four to three and a half. You just take envy out of it. When we took seven different rates down to two in North Dakota, there was no class-based anger. In three years, we’re all going to be here, and then we’re going to zero. Once you’re at the single rate tax, people go, ‘okay, I know exactly what the Kennedys pay. I know what I pay. And if you want to raise the Kennedys’ taxes, you have to raise mine too. So I say don’t raise taxes at all. And if you want to cut mine, you have to cut everybody’s. So I don’t mind if you cut the Kennedys’, because mine will be lowered too.’ I don’t think you can get to zero without first getting a flat rate. And what we’re finding is, once you’re at a flat rate, everything becomes simpler.
Washington Reporter:
What are some state-based policies you’ve seen this year that you think Republicans would be wise to start looking at implementing on a federal level if they do have control?
Grover Norquist:
Well, certainly the 10 states that have done education savings accounts, school choice, we should take anything the feds do and just block grant it. Just say we’re not going to do this, this, this, and just block grant it. That’s been very powerful. States are beginning to say ‘if you have a license to be a doctor or a nurse, truck driver in one state, we recognize you in our state,’ Arizona started that. Arizona says we recognize everybody’s. Others would go, ‘we’ll recognize you if you recognize us,’ kind of thing. Well, that takes forever, back and forth. What that states have started to do, and the Feds need to do more of is to get rid of things that are efforts at licensing. You have to have a college degree to work in this federal government here. Why? What’s the skill set you need? Well, you can go to college and not how to do that. You really want a college degree for somebody who answers the phones? There was a wonderful Monty Python skit where they’re gonna have a club and who to have and who not to have it. One guy keeps going, no poofters. And every third rule, was no poofter. It’s like this with having to have a college degree? Why? Just to show how exclusive we are. No poofter, no people who haven’t graduated college. The other states that have gone state by state on these issues have been vaping. We’ve defeated a number of people running for office as anti-vape, people. One of the first was Sen. Ron Johnson. He organized every vape store in that state in 2016, and he won with a very narrow margin. And he said, ‘I was elected with the vape vote.’ Certainly the the the income tax cuts cut, and the ease with which Iowa and North Carolina and some other states are making the same case on the corporate income tax that they make on the individual income tax. Now Trump is doing that, saying that we should cut the corporate income tax, but he doesn’t articulate it as I think he should, which is the corporate income tax, and we did polling for them, with them, in 2017 when they were running the legislation, and both polling, but also focus groups, when you ask who pays the corporate income tax, it’s amazing, average citizens really get that it comes from consumers who pay higher prices, workers with lower wages, and people who save and put money in the stock market, because the stock market goes down and their life savings goes down. And the left wing groups say that 20 percent is from workers getting paid less, and the Tax Foundation used to say 70 percent, and there are actually some economists who argue that it’s more more than 100 percent because workers lose more money than the government gets. So Iowa is phasing theirs down to zero. So is North Carolina. They literally are phasing the income tax down, looked over and said, ‘what’s this thing over here? It’s smaller than the income tax, and that’s the corporate income tax,’ everybody hates that. All the business guys say that’s the real problem for them, and they just put an automatic pilot. 12345, gone. They’ve got it scheduled to go away within the next few years in Iowa and the same thing in North Carolina.
Washington Reporter:
The Biden administration, and Chuck Schumer, for example, wanted to ban Zyn for about 24 hours. What do you make of these regulatory policies of theirs?
Grover Norquist:
The former mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg. This is his project. He wants to ban anything that looks like smoke. The Puritans used to oppose dancing because it looks like sex. So they said no dancing. They weren’t opposed to dancing, but it was too much. Vaping looks like cigarettes, literally. They think they won the fight against cigarettes by making it look uncool and tacky. Bloomberg is giving money to everybody and they have to swear to take the position of ‘we go cold turkey or nothing.’ What about this other stuff? He used to hand out free substance patches in New York when he was there. But now he’s not for that, he wants to make you stop by raising taxes higher and higher and higher, and he has that wonderful quote that says ‘I like higher taxes on lower income people, because they’re the ones who are most likely to quit drinking sugary drinks or smoking or something like that.’ The Kennedy kids will keep drinking sugary drinks or smoking cigarettes or cigars if they want to, but low income people can be affected by discriminatory taxes more easily.
Washington Reporter:
As you think about where the conservative movement is at right now, where do you see this element of the ostensible right emerge that’s anti-capitalism in some ways?
Grover Norquist:
It came out of the same magician’s hat that Liz Cheney did. ‘Can we find somebody who can trash the Republican Party claiming to be a Republican? Ooh, Liz Cheney.’ And so Liz Cheney knows when she does that, she has a future. David Frum as a writer knows that. Bill Kristol a writer knows that. But, nobody pays any attention to what public intellectuals think. These guys all think they’re Jean-Paul Sartre, okay? In France, people care about Sartre. They care what public intellectuals think. But the United States, we’re a commercial Republic. If someone says ‘I’m a public intellectual,’ people go ‘okay? And?’ And if that public intellectual says ‘well, you have to care deeply what I think today. Didn’t I tell you I wrote a poem once? Now you have to tell me I’m smart and do what I say about smoking.’ Doesn’t work in the United States in the same way that it does in France, where people care about what Sartre thinks.
Washington Reporter:
Did you have to read too much Sartre in college? Is that why you’re picking on him?
Grover Norquist:
Yes, and I had to read it in French. Nobody speaks French. Nobody told me that when I was a kid. I was under the impression that people in the world spoke this language. I was smart enough to realize in seventh grade, ‘let me get this right; we’re learning French so we can talk to people in France and Quebec. What if, instead of hiring you, I think I told this to my French teacher, which was probably not wise, we paid you to go teach the French speakers English, and then we could talk to them, because they can speak English, and there are fewer French people, so we wouldn’t need as many of you teachers hired to do it, and we’d have an extra hour out of our day here free.’ So I said, ‘this is win, win, and you can be in Paris for a few years.’
Washington Reporter:
Not a win for your grade in that class, though, probably. Young Grover Norquist is the same person as you are right now that.
Grover Norquist:
It still holds that we should teach the world English and we don’t have to do this other stuff. People who change teams, like the conservative congressional candidate radio talk show host in Chicago, who now I see screaming about stuff on X or something, there’s a place for him. If you’re a Republican, in fact, they will love you and talk about why you are the king, until you want to be Republican President. Look at John McCain. They turned on him and beat him to death. There’s always this interest in finding somebody to say, ‘I’m a Republican. I can’t stand them.’ With Nixon, they’d reach back and look to Eisenhower. And mind you, Nixon was the one who wanted to cut the deal with China. Eisenhower was the hawk. So they didn’t even know what they’re talking about. And then when Reagan was president, they said ‘well, Nixon wanted to sign treaties with the Soviet Union,’ yeah, because he thought he was losing, and didn’t know how to win economically. But you certainly didn’t have a Republican Party and Democrats willing to help at all, as Reagan had. And now they love Reagan, and now they love George W. Bush, and Dick Cheney, the guys they call Nazis. So find me one of these make believe Republicans, they’re Rockefeller Republicans, who are for giving labor unions more power and spending more money, and taxes are okay, because you have to spend more money and compromise with the left, because our policies aren’t robust enough to win. This is pre-Reagan. This is a pre-Reagan, Rockefeller Republican position that these guys have, which is, ‘well, tax increases should be okay.’ I’m sorry do you like to win elections or lose elections? When you take taxes off the table, you win. When they’re on the table, we struggle to be there. And it’s not just that. We lost Colorado because a Republican governor led a fight for tax increases. And in Virginia, we had two times the legislature voted for tax increases, and eventually the Republican Party collapsed at this legislative level. Here we are sweeping the entire South blue to red. Montana was a Democratic state. Utah, where Democrats unionized because all the miners and stuff like that. Now they’re solid red, North Dakota and South Dakota had four Bolshevik, left-wing senators throughout the Reagan years and before and after and the crazy guy George McGovern. Democrats can always outbid you. No matter what you say, the Democrats are going, ‘I’ll give you twice as much.’
Washington Reporter:
So these guys are trying to make Rockefeller Republicans great again, it sounds like. I think the synecdoche of that is Lina Khan in the administration. Now, some Republicans, even in the Senate, are warming to her. Mark Cuban first told me that Harris should not retain her. What is your message to those on the right who are saying that she’s not that bad?
Grover Norquist:
Just as the Rockefeller Republicans wanted to take away from the Republican Party the biggest arrow in their quiver of ‘we won’t raise your taxes,’ that gets you to a win half the time. And then you add to it, don’t invade small countries you can’t pronounce, then you’re really in good shape. She is trying to undo the biggest success conservatives had in the intellectual world, which was the movement to say that all antitrust has to start with the consumer welfare standard. You have to show some consumers suffer. ‘I gotta come in and break you up.’ Why? ‘Because I don’t like it. Because you’re too vertical, you’re too horizontal, you’re too diagonal.’ ‘Is anybody hurt by this?’ ‘No, you didn’t hear me. I don’t like this vertical integration. I like the horizontal integration. I don’t like people who are insufficiently integrated. Oh, and I define competition, as in Italian restaurants on this street, and there’s only one.’ So instead, Robert Bork, the one thing he got through was everybody got what a mistake was to allow people to focus on structure rather than on harm. And if you go back to the whole issue of antitrust, this is why it’s a little difficult for leftists, there never was a good case they had. There never was something where they made the world better. They went after Rockefeller and now it’s less monopolistic. Yet he started when he was at 90 percent and by the time he got a legal thing, he’d already gone down to where he was heading. All this competition that you said couldn’t happen was taking his percentages down, for crying out loud. When I was at college, they told me, we have an oligopoly that has to be regulated in cars. I said ‘there are only three car companies in the United States.’ Well, there are are car companies around the world. Oh, travel is so expensive and transport that’s not real competition, news too. This was in the 70s, just before we decided the Japanese, Koreans and the Germans were completely eating our lunch. Now, Lina Khan is going into this and she doesn’t care about welfare. She doesn’t even care about structure. She wants you to have racial discrimination as part of what you do, the racial quotas. She said she wants to be able to go after people for that on antitrust; she wants it to be ‘beat up on any business that you want,’ and I understand that there are one or two GOP senators who go ‘I’m mad at corporations, because they don’t do what I want to politically. So I think you should be able to beat them up.’ I just think it’s very bad. I understand the impulse. How come these guys are being woke, right? How come they’re letting girls in the men’s bathroom or something? Okay, that’s annoying. But the idea that the Democrats are mad that they’re making money and not giving the unions enough and stuff like that, you really want to give the state power to beat up on any company for any reason? It’s going from you have to convict somebody of a crime to put them in prison, to say you can put anywhere to prison if you want, there doesn’t have to be a crime, there doesn’t have to be harm. And for Republicans, to even flirt with that is a huge mistake.
Washington Reporter:
One of the things we were tracking also was that Senate Republicans just sent a request to the inspector general to look into whether she was leaking documents in the Visa and PBM cases. How do you think this fits in with broader weaponization of the government by the Biden administration? Is this shocking to you in its severity, or this is their goal?
Grover Norquist:
This is what they do for a living. This is their goal. They used the IRS under Obama to destroy a political movement, which was the grassroots led Tea Part. I don’t know how many press calls I got asking how much money the Koch people were putting into creating the Tea Party, or what we were funding. Exxon was supposed to be funding it. He was funding it, we were funding it, and the answer is this thing was just so incredible grassroots-y that there was no structure. But it also meant those guys, because the IRS wouldn’t let them get a 501(c)(3), (c)(4), status, they couldn’t open a bank account and borrow, or put money into it and stuff, and they all faded. They all faded. I always wondered why the left has all these demonstrations. People are now invested. Every time they hear the issue, they go, ding, ding, ding, any time a politician talks about something, ding, ding, ding, ding, ‘I’ve invested in that idea.’ And having rallies really does matter. The Tea Party rallies did have a big impact in turnout in 2010, but by 2012, they strangled the whole thing, and they were dispersed. So they used weaponization of government to win a presidential election. We need to worry about the IRS weaponization, going after people. I was on the Commission on restructuring the IRS in the late 1980s, after the Republicans caught them going through the movie stars’ tax returns. ‘Hey, look at this,’ and they’re all shipping them to their friends. And so they passed a law about this, and as a member of the commission, I asked the head of the IRS, ‘I run a center right, and I know from the newspapers that all of my friends that are being audited, and so I’ve called my left of center friends and I’ve said, anybody being audited? None were. So, why do you audit conservatives and not liberals? You did the NTU, you did Heritage, but it appears that you’re not doing ACLU, and if you wanted to do the rich ones, you’d have done the liberal ones. He said, ‘well, we’ve got this algorithm that does this. It’s all very fair.’ I said, ‘great, we’d like to see it.’ He said ‘oh, it’s a secret. You’ll have to trust us.’ Fast forward to Obama’s IRS commissioner who set up that situation in Ohio where, if you were conservative, had a conservative name, your thing went and sat on their table.
Washington Reporter:
Rep. Brett Guthrie told us that he thinks there’s a path forward on the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) during the lame duck. You have weighed in on that a lot. What is your thinking about that bill?
Grover Norquist:
The modern conservative movement needs to look at every abuse by the Obama administration and not go, ‘how can we mimic it?’ Because the answer is, when they do it, CBS, NBC, don’t care. If we thought about doing it, the cameras would be there. So even if you had no morals and you didn’t care about the Constitution or the First Amendment, it’s just stupid to think we can get away with stuff that the left gets away with. That’s not the way the rules work. And you will fix that 40 years from now. So just to change the rules now and let the government shoot anybody they want to when the government’s not in your hands, and it’s not likely be in your hands on a permanent basis, given who’s several ranks down in the bureaucracy. And one thing that Trump didn’t do was get a hold of the bureaucracy. It’s designed not to be taken hold of, except by the bureaucracy itself.
Washington Reporter:
Speaking of government expansion, what is your perspective on the IRS’s direct file program? Where does the push for this come from?
Grover Norquist:
To end privacy in America, to end financial privacy; they want to be able to know everything you do. And that’s not at all very far from what China’s supposed to do with their social credit score. ‘We know what you spent money on, and we can look at it anytime we want to.’ And we know that the IRS gives left wing groups access to whatever they want, the nice people over at ProPublica, for example. Charles Littlejohn, an IRS contractor who worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, was sentenced for this hack. But the IRS said ‘just let you know we really didn’t care you get the contract again, Booz Allen. Just to let you know we care.’ The guys had tens of thousands of violations, every one of which is five years in prison, but he was only charged on one, and that’s the Trump one, so they can go ‘oh, it’s terribly political, you’re mad at him because he released Trump’s tax records. Really disgusting. Iit just tells everybody in the world, if you decide to do this on your own someday, no one will bother you. It will be okay
Washington Reporter:
One of the topics I’ve written about while you guys on, is the constantly delayed, but now potentially implemented, push to spy on our Venmo transactions. I view this as a tax on fantasy football commissioners. Apparently this may actually happen soon. What are policies like that that you are keeping track of that are flying under the radar that may be taking money out of people’s pocketbooks without people even realizing these are coming?
Grover Norquist:
Well, the one you brought up earlier, the idea that they’ll do your taxes for you, because that will start as voluntary and become mandatory. They will use it to punish people they don’t like by auditing them. And so everyone they go after, there’ll be a reason. They’ve always viewed this as a way to make more money, to raise taxes. And by the way, if they write you a letter saying ‘you owe us an extra $500,’ are you going to hire a lawyer for $5,000 to try and not pay the $500, or are you going to just pay them $500? Of course, if they have everything and they tell you, we think you owe us money, you’ll say ‘I guess I do. I didn’t think so.’ So that’s something that’s just a stealth tax increase, and they never talk about that. They do sometimes talk about the fact that they expect to raise more money. That’s a very but the one that you just mentioned is a huge problem, and again, you have to violate people’s privacy to do that. The other one is the tax on unrecognized capital gains. Let’s see. ‘We have to know how much gold is in your teeth. We have to know everything of value in your basement. We have to know all the artwork in your house. What about the rugs in your house? We’ll only do it on rich people.’ Sure. So the idea that that’s just on rich people is wrong. They haven’t finished the sentence. We’re going to hit the rich people first…then you, because then the real money comes from letting that down or just continuing Biden’s inflation. pretty much sure everybody’s rich after a while, right? Doesn’t take very long at Biden rates to become a millionaire. People were going shopping and spending $10 in this huge thing of groceries from the 1940s. You go, ‘well, inflation doesn’t take too long to make everybody rich.’ Iremember, when I got out of college, I made four times as much as when my father got out of college in paper money. The other one is in order to tax
electric vehicles, you’re going to be taxing by mile. To be fair, we’ll tax everybody by miles, which means we need access to where you have been, they’re not going to have ones that just do mileage and not location. So that’s another huge jump. They can raise prices fairly easily that way as well. Look at how there are stickers everywhere telling you gasoline is $4.50 a gallon and that Biden sucks. Why do people care about gasoline instead of other stuff? Well, most people don’t drive past the milk price three times a day, or going down the street many times a day. Everybody knows what that is, because it’s there in big print, and people are very price
sensitive, because there are many choices. Actually, we should worry a little bit about the antitrust people going after too many choices too, the other way to solve problems, there’s too much competition.
Washington Reporter:
Is there anyone if Trump wins, who you would love to see in the administration? And then on the flip side, is there anyone if Kamala wins, who you’d be particularly horrified about her appointing?
Grover Norquist:
The list of people Kamala Harris will put in the cabinet has already been written by the AFL-CIO and the trial lawyers and the big city mayors and the Black Caucus and just all the guys just sit around and go, ‘we own a piece of this corporation because we we put in so much money and that we want this much payout.’ So they’ll bring in somebody who looks like a grandmother and governs like a radical, and if they ever didn’t, they’d be removed. Or if they didn’t, the people under them. Maybe Biden isn’t left wing on absolutely everything. But whoever he handed the note to to say, do this, they would decide whether they did it. Or not. So I don’t think it matters very much. With Trump, he has a little more freedom. There’s no part of the bureaucracy that is to the right of where Reagan Republicans are, so there’s no internal pressure on Republicans to do the right thing. So it’s very easy for them to do poorly, because the bureaucracy takes you the other way even if you’re trying, if you’re rowing in one direction, the bureaucracy is running a current against you.
Washington Reporter:
Is there any tax that you think should go up on?
Grover Norquist:
No. The only legitimate reason to raise taxes is to raise revenue for things that are mentioned in the Constitution. There’s nothing in the Constitution that says you can tax something because you want to manage people’s choices. When they were trying to raise money for something, they go, ‘oh, we’ll do this and that’ll we’ll tax the evil cigarette companies, or we’ll tax people who drink liquor.’ It’s just a way to sell tax increases and get people who’d never support that. I remember Pat Robertson was in favor of taxing cigarettes. What do you think they’ll do with that money? They’re not teaching abstinence in schools with your money. They’ll do the opposite with your money, and he said ‘well, I don’t like that.’ You know, there are a bunch of people in the government who don’t like people going to church and they’ll start taxing that. We win if the government is neutral. Why would we ever ask for anything other than neutrality, which would justify them throwing rocks.
Washington Reporter:
Now for the serious questions: did you go to Burning Man this year?
Grover Norquist:
I did. Burning Man is the last week in August which ends Labor Day. So I went this year, and I’ve gone for the last 12 years, and intend to keep going.
Washington Reporter:
Is Burning Man a thing that a thing that you’ve seen change?
Grover Norquist:
Well, the first time I went, I was invited by the founder of Burning Man, Larry Harvey, and his wife, to come. So I said, I’ve always been aware of Burning Man, and always thought it was something I’d like to do, but hadn’t. So yes, I went, and then that next year, 2012, they signed me up. They put it the same week as the Republican convention. I tweeted. I said, we had to put together a center right meeting in Tampa. We did that, so the press sat and watched one of the Wednesday meetings. But it was a Wednesday meeting with people from all over the country. So not just people from D.C., a handful of people from other country. It was very good, and we’ve done it each time. But I tweeted out, who was the idiot who put the Republican convention the same week as Burning Man? I said is there time to change this? And it got some good fun pickup. And then a year later, I tweeted, okay, it’s official. I’m going to Burning Man. So I’ve been every year since. I did get a note from somebody who was a journalist who said that he had done both. He’d gone to Burning Man the first half of the week and the GOP convention the second half. So there was one person in that Venn diagram. But when I first did it, there was on the chattering website, Burning Man websites, people who complained. But as the head of Burning Man said, there are 10 rules of Burning Man, and the first one is radical inclusion, which is everybody’s enlightened, so anyone who says they’re a burner and finds it odd that somebody else is there or distasteful, is in violation of that. I give a talk there each year, starting my first year, to the Psychedelic Drug Association, and they have a lecture series, and I give the same speech I’d give to the College Republicans in Utah about the politics of liberty. How do you expand them? And the I went there, and they had somebody had passed out these little pictures of Grover from Sesame Street with the European red slash through. So no Grovers. And I got a bunch from my daughters, and I think I gave them all away to my kids because I was looking for them the other day. I know I must have it somewhere in the collection of stuff. But there’s been, there’s been no real flack. And in point of fact that every time I go people, say ‘you and I are the only Republicans here,’ and I say ‘yes, you and the other 30 people who said the exact same thing to me.’ And when they poll it, it polls much more diverse than you might think. They call it a census and I helped them design the census system, trying to get the wording that would get you the actual the best numbers. They left anarchists out because you don’t know whether somebody is right-wing or a left-wing anarchist. So you take anarchists out, and you just go from libertarian to Communist with five options, I think would give you a better role, because some people say anarchist, meaning, my life is anarchic. You go, it’s different every time. The weather is different every time, the people you run into are different. The art is different, the music is different. And you could walk half a mile in any direction and be in a different world. So there’s there’s music camps, there are art camps, there’s a gay section, there’s a children’s section. We have families who are together. There’s everything. The first time I went actually watched the one of the movies on the place, and there were a lot of pictures of people forgot to wear all their clothes, and people with boas and flashy clothes. One out of 200 people you see is not wearing clothes and you have to be on the lookout for it. If you dress up too much, they call you a star pony, something like that.
Washington Reporter:
Well, thank you for your time today — quite a wide-ranging conversation.