Grover Norquist vs. Bill Kristol on Taxes and Pentagon Spending

Grover Norquist spoke yesterday at the Center for the National Interest, and the event drew a gaggle of skeptics convinced that President Obama's victory over Mitt Romney might spell the end of Norquist's vaunted Taxpayer Protection Pledge. He sounded an optimistic tone, pointing to past election cycles when the pledge was prematurely declared dead on arrival.

I was most interested in what he had to say about the tiny number of Congressional Republicans who have tried -- and so far failed -- to build support for tax increases in order to protect the Pentagon from spending cuts. In his opening remarks, Norquist peered into his crystal ball:

With divided government, I think you get the sequester. The President said he doesn't want to change the money for the Pentagon; Mitch McConnell has said we’re not raising taxes to ransom the Pentagon budget cuts. And, interestingly,…a lot of the focus has been on the Pentagon. The Ds are a lot more concerned about the $50 billion in domestic discretionary spending restraint every year than the Rs are on the defense budget….And you did see the Republican Study Committee, the conservative caucus within the Republican House, which is a majority of House members (maybe 60 percent), announce the only thing worse than sequestration would be not having the savings. So this stampede that was attempted -- the problem with the stampede is that there are only two people trying to start the stampede -- and it didn't take. You didn't get a demand that the defense budget…remain untouched, either in public opinion or in the House and the Senate.

He's right. You don't see a groundswell of public opinion calling for tax increases to fund a still-larger military. On the contrary, most polls actually show more support for Pentagon cuts than for cuts in other spending. This poll (.pdf, Q56) found that 52 percent of Republicans, and 57 percent of Independents, are opposed to any increase in taxes in order to maintain the current advantage in military power. In this case, at least, members of Congress are accurately representing the wishes of their constituents.

I invited Norquist to expand on his comments about this failure to mobilize public support for more Pentagon spending in Washington and on Capitol Hill, and whether self-described conservatives risk undermining the GOP's brand on taxes and spending. What does he think, for example, when Bill Kristol stumps for tax increases, opening the door for major media outlets to spin the story as "even conservatives like Bill Kristol support tax increases to protect the Pentagon."

Norquist replied:

Bill Kristol has been on record saying that if the conservatives didn't want to be the war party that he'd join up with the ... Democrat liberal hawks. ... It was an odd sort of threat, but it was kind of an explanation that he doesn't see himself as a mainstream Reagan Republican. Everything is hawkish foreign policy (not a Reaganite foreign policy, but a hawkish foreign policy). So that's not surprising. That's ... what he does, but it's not at all transferable. There isn't a caucus in the House or the Senate that falls in that category.

He closed with a unscripted rant against the GOP's situational Keynesianism. It's "intellectually dishonest," he said, to oppose Obama-Reid-Pelosi's stimulus, but then embrace Romney's version in the form of massive military spending. His remarks echo some of what he said a few months ago in a Cato podcast, but here are a few new gems:

I thought that the Romney people ill served the country and themselves when they ran these campaigns that if the defense budget was cut all these jobs would disappear. Now lets see, we just spent four years making fun of Obama's multiplier that if the federal government spends x number of dollars you create jobs.

That's like arguing that people who are involved in organ donations are creating additional kidneys. No they're not, they're just moving them around....the government creates jobs the way ticks create blood. No it doesn't....You can move stuff around but you took it from somewhere and then you put it somewhere else. You take a dollar from here and kill a job and put it over there and then you hold a press conference over here....

For the Republicans to talk about how defense spending creates jobs, I think, was unfortunate. You can make an argument that you need this plane or this tank, or "The Canadians are being annoying again. Keep an eye on 'em." I'm all for that. We should have a strong national defense. But don't sell it as a jobs program. It's intellectually dishonest, and it was a shame that it was done.