Post Rapture Blues: Grover Norquist Slouches Toward Sacramento and Other Signs of the Coming Apocalypse
Less than a week after dodging the end of the world as we know it, Californians were met with the news that Grover Norquist, the hatchet-man of the hard right, had come to Sacramento and was roaming the hallways of the Capitol reminding Republican legislators (all but a handful of whom had signed his notorious pledge to never raise taxes) that bad things would happen if they reconsidered. Norquist, who conservative pundit Tucker Carlson once called “a mean-spirited, humorless, dishonest little creep . . . the leering, drunken uncle everyone else wishes would stay home,” is a darkly looming figure. As Drake Bennett recently pointed out in Business Week:
Grover Norquist has no real precedent in American politics. A single unelected actor with a single issue, he holds immense power over the Republican Party’s fiscal platform, and, through it, the national policy debate. “I don’t know of anyone outside of government who has had this kind of influence on politics before,” writes Columbia University historian Alan Brinkley in an e-mail. “He’s sui generis, I think, not a politician, not visible very often in the media, but remarkably powerful.”
Norquist’s goal in California is to make sure that California Republicans don’t allow voters to