Who Is Grover Norquist?

One thing about an absolutist is he can be consistent and he can look brave and pure hearted. 

Grover Norquist, who runs an organization in Washington called Americans For Tax Reform, has drawn a clear line and he's somehow attracted 218 Republican members of the House of Representatives and 34 Republican senators to his clearly delineated pledge: I will never vote for a tax increase.

Grover says, "I don't want to kill government. I just want to shrink it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in my tub." 

Very catchy, don't you think?

His book is titled, "Getting the Government's Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, Our Lives."  Can't you just see a throng of white supremacists in Idaho,  sitting around a campfire and holding a book club with that one?

He holds a weekly seance with Republican members of Congress in an amphitheater with rows of seats surrounding an oval table where Mr. Norquist sits, king of the roost.

He has never been elected. He is above elections. He is the high priest of the Republican Party. He has the keys to the golden handcuffs for which, for some reason, Republican lawmakers willingly extend their wrists.

If he has not shrunk the federal government to the size he can drown it in his bathroom, he has at least managed to drown the Republican Party there.

What this means, of course, is that a substantial portion of Congress has agreed not to govern, if what we mean by governing is compromise, voting to enable the government to reduce its own debt, provide for FEMA and Coast Guard helicopters to rescue citizens in distress, sustain armed forces, send out Social Security and Medicare checks and do all the essential things which have become so much a part of our lives we hardly realize they are government services at all. 

The federal government has got so good at doing things even its detractors fail to appreciate how essential it is--which is where the famous remark, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare," comes from. 

Not having been elected, Norquist does not have to provide constituent services, respond to flooded parts of his district, serve or protect. He can sit, fat and happy, at the head of his oval table during his weekly audiences with those who do have to govern and he can remind them what his commands are. He is a sort of Brody from Homeland, the Marine Sergeant elected to Congress whose mission is to destroy the government from within. 

But unlike Brody, Grover's power does not derive from a foreign terrorist--he is a homegrown terrorist, determined to return our government, if not our nation, to the 19th century, to the time before the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt, who Grover considers the first of America's long line of socialist presidents.

He is, and he can be, mad as a Hatter, but it doesn't matter because he has no real duties or responsibilities, other than to hold forth, like a slightly higher brow Rush Limbaugh, expostulating pithy, quotable burbles, entertaining the resentful masses, those people who will not give up their guns until they are pried from their cold, dead fingers, because their guns make them feel...Big, and important.

Grover is truculent, and he is bold and sure of himself , and there have always been men like him, and likely always will be. 

The mystery is: why do all these Republican congressmen charge like so many lemmings to the precipice of his office?

Of course, the one New Hampshire politician who decried "Pledge Politics" was asked at every forum why she had not taken the pledge--in this case a pledge to never sign into law a state income tax--and she was defeated in the primary by Ms. Hassan, who had signed that pledge. And at every forum, Jackie Cilley explained this would hand cuff the governor who signed the pledge, that an income tax had to be a viable option, even if you intended never to use it,  if only to intimidate unruly representatives who refused to compromise.  And at every forum, some old goat would croak, "Then you're for an income tax."

So, I guess I have discovered who Grover is. He is that dark side of ourselves, the nasty demon in  our soul who simply does not want to think things through, who just wants to stamp feet and throw tantrums and spit and scream.

He is the ultimate Trojan Horse. Just reel him into the city, past the gates of compromise and good governance and when night falls, the hell cats of destruction will pour out of his belly and rampage through the city and bring down the government in flames, and be happy about it.