Grover Norquist

Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform told The Post he "authorized" Republican senators to vote for Sen. Tom Coburn's proposal to cancel billions in tax credits for ethanol blenders ["Senate spares ethanol tax credit," news story, June 15] : I must have missed it when Republicans ceded their responsibility to make their own educated voting decisions and agreed to follow in lock step the instructions of an unelected individual with a partisan and unyielding agenda.     Linda Alberty, Arlington

RICHMOND — Two 20-year veterans of Virginia's House of Delegates lost their seats Tuesday, falling to GOP primary challengers who assailed their support for a tax-heavy transportation funding overhaul . Del. Joe T. May (Loudoun) and Del. Beverly J. Sherwood (Frederick) lost to political newcomers who railed against the transportation plan, which imposes a $1.2-billion-a-year tax increase. But two other incumbent Republicans who had supported the legislation this year — House Speaker William J. Howell (Stafford)

Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican, was recently captured on video asserting that there are "78 to 81" Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party. Of course, it's not unusual for some renegade lawmaker from either side of the aisle to say something outrageous. What made West's comment — right out of the McCarthyite playbook of the 1950s — so striking was the almost complete lack of condemnation from Republican congressional leaders or other major party figures, including the remaining presidential...

VIRGINIA ATTORNEY GENERAL Ken Cuccinelli, who's hoping voters promote him to governor in November, has had an election-year epiphany. He now says that jobs, rather than the incendiary social issues that have been his stock in trade for years, are of paramount concern to Virginians. We wonder how Mr. Cuccinelli's 11th-hour conversion squares with his recent attempts to torpedo the most important transportation funding measure to emerge from Richmond in 27 years.

I found Dana Milbank's June 24 Sunday Opinion column, "No way, no how, no tax hikes," even more disheartening than many previous articles about the influence of anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, because I had thought that Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) were men of stature and integrity. As Mr. Milbank pointed out, they both backed off considerations of a tax increase after being visited by Mr. Norquist. Common sense and the good of the country apparently take a back seat to the power Mr. Norquist wields over his...

Democrats are unanimous in charging that the debt-reduction supercommittee collapsed because Republicans refused to raise taxes. Apparently, Republicans are in the thrall of one Grover Norquist, the anti-tax campaigner, whom Sen. John Kerry called "the 13th member of this committee without being there. " Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid helpfully suggested "maybe they should impeach Grover Norquist. " With that, Norquist officially replaces the Koch brothers as the great malevolent manipulator that controls the republic by pulling unseen...

RICHMOND — Two 20-year veterans of Virginia's House of Delegates lost their seats Tuesday, falling to GOP primary challengers who assailed their support for a tax-heavy transportation funding overhaul . Del. Joe T. May (Loudoun) and Del. Beverly J. Sherwood (Frederick) lost to political newcomers who railed against the transportation plan, which imposes a $1.2-billion-a-year tax increase. But two other incumbent Republicans who had supported the legislation this year — House Speaker William...

Maybe the fever is breaking. Maybe the delirium is lifting. Maybe Republicans are finally asking themselves: What were we thinking when we put an absurdly unrealistic pledge to a Washington lobbyist ahead of our duty to the American people? I said maybe. So far, the renunciations of Grover Norquist 's " Taxpayer Protection Pledge " amount to a trickle , not a flood. But we're seeing the first signs in years that on the question of taxation — one of the fundamental responsibilities of government...

At our 25th college reunion in 2003, Grover Norquist — the brain and able spokesman for the radical right — and I, along with other classmates who had been in public or political life, participated in a lively panel discussion about politics. During his presentation, Norquist explained why he believed that there would be a permanent Republican majority in America. One person interrupted, as I recall, and said, "C'mon, Grover, surely one day a Democrat will win the White House.

Here's the first lesson from the early skirmishing over ways to avoid the fiscal cliff: Democrats and liberals have to stop elevating Grover Norquist , the anti-government crusader who wields his no-tax pledge as a nuclear weapon, into the role of a political Superman. Pretending that Norquist is more powerful than he is allows Republicans to win acclaim they haven't earned yet. Without making a single substantive concession, they get loads of praise just for saying they are willing to ignore those old...

The National Rifle Association's convention in Houston this weekend bristled with the combative and triumphant rhetoric of a group that achieved a major victory in 2013: completely defeating the White House-backed package of gun-control legislation. On the surface, the gun-rights group seems stronger than ever with tens of thousands enthusiastic participants, record high membership and effusive approval for the path taken by the its leader, Wayne LaPierre. Beneath the surface, however, some of the NRA's...

Modern-day Republicans make no secret of their passion for dismantling public institutions — "shrink government to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub" in the increasingly discredited formulation of Grover Norquist , the dark wizard of the right's anti-tax cult. Republicans have waged a multi-faceted campaign against public schools, hoping to use charters and vouchers to supplant this basic public institution. They tried to privatize Social Security under George W. Bush and now relentlessly push...

Read more from Dana Milbank's archive , follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook . As a new Congress convenes, it has become an unquestioned truth among Republicans that their party has as much of a mandate as President Obama because voters returned them to power in the House. The mantra has been intoned by John Boehner, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist and many other party eminences, and there is a certain logic to saying that the voters, by...

Republican House leaders on Wednesday were frantically trying to build support for a GOP proposal to avoid the year-end "fiscal cliff," attempting to reassure a wary rank-and-file that taking the unprecedented step of allowing taxes to rise for those making more than $1 million a year is the party's best option. Leadership aides expressed cautious optimism that the plan, advanced by House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) Tuesday, will pass the House in a scheduled Thursday vote.

UNLIKE MANY of his fellow Republicans, Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell has said plainly for years that funding for his state's rickety transportation network is inadequate and unsustainable. He also recognizes that reality precludes raiding other core functions of government — education, public safety, health care — to build roads; Democrats are united against that strategy, and more than a few Republicans oppose it, too. But even as he enters his last year in office, it remains unclear whether Mr....

Jim DeMint was on the verge of being where every senator longs to be — holding a top position on an influential committee with oversight of industries critical to his state. But, as is so often the case with the maverick from South Carolina, DeMint turned his back on convention. Instead he announced Thursday that he would resign to become president of the Heritage Foundation. The move puts De­Mint at the head of the most prominent conservative nonprofit organization in Washington and in a...

The July 13 Style section's featured story on conservative activist Grover Norquist [ "Taxes hold 'em"] reminded me of an experience working for a senior Washington official many years ago. At the first senior staff meeting of my new job, my boss was told by staff that they had arranged for a Style profile of him. He responded, "Great, but why don't we just take all my suits out and paint bull's-eyes on them, because as soon as such a story runs...

The June 6 front-page article " For GOP, anti-tax orthodoxy goes deep " was truly frightening. Think of it: 275 of 288 Republican lawmakers in Congress (and who knows how many more in state and local governments) have sworn unwavering fealty to the political philosophy and economic theory of a 14-year-old Grover Norquist. Assuming Mr. Norquist was an unusually prescient and sophisticated ninth-grader when he developed his political philosophy, that was still some 40 years ago — before the Internet and cellphones, before...

Here's the first lesson from the early skirmishing over ways to avoid the fiscal cliff: Democrats and liberals have to stop elevating Grover Norquist , the anti-government crusader who wields his no-tax pledge as a nuclear weapon, into the role of a political Superman. Pretending that Norquist is more powerful than he is allows Republicans to win acclaim they haven't earned yet. Without making a single substantive concession, they get loads of praise just for saying they are willing to ignore those old pledges to Grover.

Looking for a job? Then you've likely been cleaning up your resume, making more space to describe the accomplishments you've reached in each of your positions of employment. If you ran out of room, trying to keep your CV to a reasonable length, you probably kept a couple of lines for your degrees and axed the volunteer work you've done. In this job market, you might worry, all those hours spent volunteering for a local pet shelter could look like someone with too much time on their hands.