Grover Norquist Can’t Believe What He’s Hearing

Republicans are considering a tax hike on the wealthy, and Grover Norquist is beside himself. “It’s an incredibly destructive idea economically, and very foolish politically,” the longtime anti-tax activist told me this week. The concept was once unthinkable in the GOP, yet many Republicans are signaling that the party might just break the first commandment of conservative politics.

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More than in his first term, Trump seems open to proposals that match his populist rhetoric. “The reality is that the constituency and base of the Republican Party is shifting,” the GOP economist Oren Cass told me, “and there is rightly and deservedly much more focus on the concerns of working families and much less on what corporations and the highest-income households want.” He added, “We are definitely in a new world.”

Cass, a former adviser to Mitt Romney who founded the think tank American Compass, has denounced the GOP’s commitment to lower taxes no matter the fiscal or political cost, making himself a bête noire of Norquist’s. Their dispute is intensifying as Republicans in Congress negotiate legislation to extend Trump’s first-term cuts, which are set to expire at the end of the year. “As a matter of good economic policy, tax cuts are not getting the job done, and they haven’t for some time,” Cass said. Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act slashed rates across the board; the highest earners saw their income rate fall from 39.6 to 37 percent. “These were incredibly expensive,” Cass said. “They certainly do not pay for themselves, and they do not provide the sort of investment incentives and, therefore, growth that their supporters want them to have.”

To Norquist, Cass’s critique is blasphemy. Raising taxes on the rich, he told me, is for Democrats. And, as Norquist was quick to note, Trump has repeatedly promised to make permanent his 2017 tax cuts, including those for the top income bracket. “The president campaigned on not doing this. The lady running against him campaigned on doing this,” Norquist said. “I don’t think that Trump is going to adopt Kamala Harris’s policies at this point.”

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Norquist blames the GOP’s swerve in part on Cass, who Norquist said has talked privately about advising Vice President J. D. Vance. (“I don’t comment on private conversations with policy makers at any level in either party,” Cass told me.)