Anti-tax activist Grover Norquist fired back at Sen. John Kerry on Monday, charging that it’s Democrats — not Rep...
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Anti-tax activist Grover Norquist fired back at Sen. John Kerry on Monday, charging that it’s Democrats — not Republicans — who are standing in the way of a supercommittee deal.
“[Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid, the leader of the Democratic Party, wants to raise taxes to spend more money. I think Sen. Kerry was actually trying to come up with a solution that would work, but Reid wouldn’t let him do that,” Norquist said on Fox News.
In an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Kerry argued that the “most significant block” to lawmakers reaching a deficit deal on Capitol Hill was the “insistence, insistence, insistence on the Grover Norquist [no taxes] pledge and extending the Bush tax cuts.”
Norquist said the Republican Party won’t be “fooled” into raising taxes again.
Democrats are hoping for a repeat of 1982 and 1990, Norquist also said on Fox, “when they tricked Republicans into tax increases [by] promising them phony spending restraints.”
“Republicans are not going to walk into that room again … they’re not going to be fooled to raise taxes in return for promises of spending restraint,” he added. “What [Democrats] are upset about is that the modern Republican Party has become, since Ronald Reagan, the party that will not raise taxes. … If you want higher taxes, vote for the Democrat.”
And the GOP isn’t the only party that has a “pledge,” Norquist said.
“I’m kind of concerned about the secret pledges that Democrats make to the special spending interests — the labor unions and the trial unions and the earmark crowd — that they would keep raising taxes to give them money,” he said. “Those are pledges, but they are secret and they don’t tell you about them.”
As the congressional supercommittee faces a looming deadline for reaching a $1.2 trillion deficit-reduction deal that is now just days away, Norquist has come under fire from some lawmakers for being an obstacle to reaching an agreement.
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