Stretching Our Credulity
Grover Norquist exhibits nothing if not temerity,
But his remarks on the economic recovery inspire hilarity.
In Grover’s world,
The recovery’s unfurled,
Not due to Obama’s policies, but to Republican austerity.
Tag: Grover Norquist
Republican Party Boss: GOP Establishment Supports Romney Because He Is Weak and Will Follow Our Orders
All we have to do is replace Obama … We are not auditioning for fearless leader. We don’t need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We want the Ryan budget … We just need a president to sign this stuff. We don’t need someone to think it up or design it. The leadership now for the modern conservative movement for the next 20 years will be coming out of the House and the Senate … Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States. This is a change for Republicans: the House and Senate doing the work with the president signing bills. His job is to be captain of the team, to sign the legislation that has already been prepared.
– Republican lobbyist and party boss Grover Norquist, in a speech to CPAC 2012
Republican Party Boss Puts Impeaching Obama on the Table
NORQUIST: Obama can sit there and let all the tax [cuts] lapse, and then the Republicans will have enough votes in the Senate in 2014 to impeach.
ThinkProgess suggests impeaching Pres. Obama because Congress let tax cuts expire would be tough sledding:
Norquist certainly revels in his power, but suggesting Republicans impeach the president over tax cuts is wildly outlandish. According to the Constitution, the president, vice president, or public officials can only be impeached for “treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Preserving a tax cut that gives more to the top 1 percent than the average income of the 99 percent hardly qualifies.
GOP Tax Boss Grover Norquist: Allowing Bush Tax Cuts to Expire ‘Not Technically a Tax Increase’
Washington Post, via Jonathan Chait:
[According] to [Grover] Norquist’s interpretation of the Americans for Tax Reform pledge, lawmakers have the technical leeway to bring in as much as $4 trillion in new tax revenue — the cost of extending President George W. Bush’s tax cuts for another decade — without being accused of breaking their promise. “Not continuing a tax cut is not technically a tax increase,” Mr. Norquist told us. So it doesn’t violate the pledge? “We wouldn’t hold it that way,” he said.
Chait responds: “It’s pretty strange, isn’t it? Apparently Norquist interprets his pledge in some ultra-literal way that precludes it, in the case, from fulfilling its primary purpose. On the other hand, a plan to pass a one-dollar tax hike while cutting federal spending in half would violate the pledge.”
The More Like Reagan Republicans Try to Be, the Less Like Reagan They Are
The question is, if Ronald Reagan could compromise, why wouldn’t folks who idolize Ronald Reagan be willing to engage in those same kinds of compromises?
— Pres. Barack Obama, trying to understand why today’s Republicans allow themselves to be bullied by Ronald Reagan protege Grover Norquist, putting their pledge to him above Ronald Reagan himself.
Tea Baggers Hate Name-Calling, Except When They Do It
As we all learned in kindergarten, one consistent characteristic of bullies is that they can dish it out but they can’t take it.
Case in point: Grover Norquist, the self-appointed commandant of the right-wing thought police, was outraged recently when he learned that in an upcoming book by Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter, Pres. Obama refers to members of the tea party protest mobs as “tea baggers.”
In a spleen vent to a columnist for the Washington Times, the right-wing propaganda sheet published by the Unification Church, a South Korean Christian cult, Norquist compared use of the term “tea bagger” to the epithet “nigger”:
