Grover Norquist

With Sonia Sotomayor's nomination having been voted out of the Senate Judiciary Committee on a vote of 13-6, she is scheduled to get a floor vote next week where it is expected that she will be easily confirmed.

Resigned to the inevitable, right-wing are doing all they can to spin this as a victory that will pay huge dividends in future elections:

"Republicans can reap significant political benefits by voting against her confirmation and making her an issue in key races next year," conservative activist Ralph Reed told his supporters in a memo.

Voters will remember that "it is a gun vote, and this was not a judge vote. It was a racial quota vote. She is for quotas," added Grover Norquist, a leading conservative activist, in an interview.

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Norquist said conservatives can paint Sotomayor as a dangerous liberal just like President Barack Obama.

"She tarnishes him a little bit," said Norquist, who is president of Americans for Tax Reform and a member of the NRA board of directors.

In the Washington Independent, David Weigel provides more insight into this effort:

“The Republican senators did much better than I expected,” said Manny Miranda, the chairman of the Third Branch Conference, a judicial conservative umbrella group that opposed Sotomayor’s nomination largely behind the scenes.

In early June, Miranda had been bearish on the Republican conference, doubtful that it would put up a fight. He called Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell “limp-wristed” and organized 145 conservative activists to campaign for a filibuster of Sotomayor, which they’re not going to get. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), in announcing his opposition to the nominee, admitted that her confirmation was probably inevitable. Yet they feel like the debate over Sotomayor was as much as a conservative success as it could have possibly been, and they see a chance to give the nominee the lowest level of support from the opposition party since the bruising 1991 fight over Clarence Thomas.

“When we started, I didn’t expect more than 16 ‘no’ votes,” said Miranda. “Now I think we may go as high as 29 votes. We’ve achieved quite a lot.”

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“The NRA’s decision to score the vote is a huge statement,” said Curt Levey, director of the Committee for Justice. “They were hesitant to get involved. Even if Sotomayor is eventually confirmed, the fact that the NRA came to realize the importance of Supreme Court nominations in protecting gun rights is a very big deal. The grassroots have been activated.”

Sotomayor is widely expected to be confirmed next week and you'll notice that all of Miranda's strident demands that Republicans lead a filibuster against her seem to have disappeared, as have his repeated assertions that any vote on her nomination before the August recess would be glaring failure of Republican leadership:

The mark of failed Republican leadership -- already strong-armed by Democrats on hearing scheduling -- will certainly be allowing a confirmation vote before the August recess that denies time to senators and to the American people. Republican leaders will fail too if their only goal is to mirror the 22-22 Democrat vote for Judge Roberts and simply deliver 20 Republicans for and 20 against.

Miranda and company had one demand of Senate Republicans: Under no circumstances allow a vote on Sotomayor's nomination before the August recess. Yet that is exactly what is going to happen and, instead of blasting them for their failure, Miranda is praising them for a job well done because their token opposition will be slightly bigger than he initially imagined.

Why is the Right suddenly so forgiving?  Maybe because they knew all along that their efforts weren't going to stop Sotomayor and they were just trying to pick a fight and look important, which is essentially what Curt Levey admitted to Weigel:

“The goal isn’t to defeat Sotomayor,” explained Levey. “It’s to send enough of a warning shot that future nominees won’t be as hostile to the Constitution.”

The Committee for Justice, for example, developed five ads formatted for television and newspapers, one of which compared Sotomayor’s work for the Puerto Rican Defense Fund to President Obama’s friendship with reformed Weather Underground member Bill Ayers. It got plenty of attention; people clicked through to the committee’s site, and some donated. But TV viewers won’t see that particular attack on their screens. “I don’t think the ad was effective,” Levey admitted. “We’ll run some ads in the final week, but I don’t think we’ll run that ad.”

There has been some discussion lately of the bubbling tension within the Republican Party's base between the fiscal conservatives and the social conservatives.  Frankly, this tension has always existed but only tends to surface when the GOP is out of power and the two sides are wrangling for influence, with the fiscal conservatives claiming that the social conservatives' focus on culture war issues is driving away potential Republican voters while the social conservatives claim the the only reason the GOP is even a viable party is because of the loyalty of the Religious Right base.  

Grover Norquist undoubtedly comes down on the fiscal conservative side and so it's no surprise to see him sit down with Dan Gilgoff to offer the social conservatives a little "tough love":

[Religious Right] leaders sometimes who announce that they want to make everybody be one religion or make everybody think one way ... Some religious right leaders do that, acting as if everybody of their faith persuasion votes on their command, which is insulting, not true, and ridiculous. They shouldn't talk like that.

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James Dobson made some comment that 40 percent of the votes for George W. Bush in 2004 came from evangelical Protestants, therefore you owe the presidency to us and you need to do what we want. It's missing why they voted for Bush. They didn't vote for him because they're evangelical Protestants. They voted for Bush because they wanted to be left alone in their faith and family commitments, which are evangelical Protestant. But the orthodox Jews and the Muslims who voted for Bush voted for the same reason, so you can't go to Bush and say, "Govern as a Baptist."

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Why is a guy who wants to go to church all day in a room with a guy who wants to make money all day and the guy who wants to fire guns all day? What is it we have in common? We all want to be left alone in the zone that is most important in our lives. And if you don't understand why people are in the room, you don't understand how you can piss off people who should be your friend.

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Traditional-values conservatives who thought the Republicans weren't doing anything the last eight years remind me of that old joke where the guy is leaning up against the building and a policeman comes over and says, "Move along." And the guy says, "I'm holding the building up." And the cop goes, "Don't be an idiot, get out of here." And the guy walks away, and the building falls down. The Republicans in the House and Senate were stopping a whole flood of left-of-center social issues on abortion, gay issues, everything. They weren't winning those issues because the votes weren't there to pass stuff. But they were stopping bad stuff.

You do have some leaders, not just social conservatives, who want other people to do their work for them. I never insist that a congressman and or a senator go out and lead on the tax issue. I lead on the tax issue. I make it easy for congressmen and senators to do the right thing. There are some social conservatives, like some other guys, who want the president to be point man on their issue. And presidents don't do that. They want congressmen and senators to jump on the hand grenade for them. No. Make it necessary for candidates to vote X, and they will.

Whining is not a way to change policy or make you beloved by elected officials. Some social conservatives think, "How come the Republican leadership hasn't done X?" The real question is: Why haven't you made it the easy and smart thing for any elected official to do?

As for the issue of marriage equality, Norquist refused to say whether he supports it, saying simply that he hasn't focused on it and saying that the government shouldn't even be involved in the marriage business anyway:

Churches, synagogues, and mosques should write marriage contracts, and the state should enforce contracts. You shouldn't have sacraments organized, managed, and defined by the states.

Communities of faith ought to be into denationalizing marriage, just as I want to denationalize healthcare and education, rather than trying to get the federal government to run the post office correctly or manage marriage correctly.

Of course, "denationalizing marriage" is exactly what the Religious Right doesn't want because it could lead to states granting marriage rights to same-sex couples, which is why they are insisting on the need for a federal marriage amendment.

Needless to say, efforts to repair the rift between the social and fiscal conservatives are probably not going to be helped much by the fact that one of the leading fiscal conservatives more or less accused the Religious Right of being a bunch of whiners who have no idea how politics actually works.

As outrage grows over AIG’s decision to give hundreds of millions of dollars in “retention bonuses” to employees (even though some don’t even work there anymore) after receiving more than $170 billion in bailout funds, members of Congress are considering proposals that would levy heavy taxes on the bonuses:

[L]eading Democrats proposed using the tax code to punish executives at the firm, in which the federal government controls an 80 percent stake, unless those payouts are surrendered voluntarily.

Action on the legislation could begin as early as today in the Senate. A proposal from Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and the panel's ranking Republican, Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), would levy an excise tax on AIG and the executives who received the payments, adding up to more than 90 percent of the total of the bonuses. That tax would also apply to future bonuses awarded, either by AIG or by other firms receiving federal aid … Democratic lawmakers raced to put their proposals on the table. Reps. Steve Israel (N.Y.) and Tim Ryan (Ohio) introduced the Bailout Bonus Tax Bracket Act to create a 100 percent tax on bonuses over $100,000 that are distributed to employees of financial firms receiving federal bailout money. Rep. John D. Dingell (Mich.) offered a version that would tax such bonuses at a 95 percent rate.

Whether or not that is a good idea is debatable, but Grover Norquist and the anti-tax zealots over at Americans for Tax Reform are not interested in participating in that debate, saying that the bailout should never have happened in the first place and that efforts by the government to recover this money constitute a “secret tax increase” that must be offset by other tax cuts :

"Let's be clear---the bailout should have never happened, no matter who is benefiting. No more bailout money should be paid.  Any monies that are set to go out should be immediately-rescinded," said ATR President Grover Norquist.  "But two wrongs don't make a right.  A tax increase does not 'make up for' a bad decision on spending.  If politicians decide that taxes need to be raised on AIG executives, they should at least have the decency to cut taxes somewhere else."

This is taxpayer money that the government is trying to recover, but in Norquist’s myopic worldview, all he can see is a “secret tax increase.”

You have got to hand it to Norquist, as he seems committed to standing by his “no tax increases, ever” principle even when it leads to fundamentally absurd conclusions such as this.

Sometimes you just have to laugh:

Last week, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann was presented with the "Guardian of Worker Freedom" award by the Alliance for Worker Freedom.  The AWF honored the Congresswoman with the award for her commitment to workers’ rights, open markets, and labor freedom in the [sic] 2008.  Bachmann also received the award for her efforts in 2007.

“I am honored to be receiving this award,” said Bachmann. “The men and women who make up America’s workforce are the heart and soul of this economy.  And in the face of our serious economic challenges it is more critical now than ever to encourage job creation and expand workers’ freedoms and opportunities.”

The nonpartisan Alliance for Worker Freedom presented the “Guardian of Worker Freedom” award to Representatives who stood up for the freedoms and interests of workers and against special interests and regulatory schemes that crush employment opportunity.

“By voting in favor of workers [sic] rights and freedoms, Congresswoman Bachmann deserves to be honored for siding with the rank-and-file American worker,” said AWF Executive Director Brian M. Johnson.  “Representative Bachmann is without a doubt a true guardian of worker freedom.”

The Alliance for Worker Freedom is a “special project” (aka “front-group”) for Grover Norquist and his Americans for Tax Reform, which is not exactly known for being overly committed to the well-being, security, or rights of the American worker. 

Apparently Bachmann and Norquist think that the American workforce is made up primarily of idiots who can’t see through their pathetically self-serving charade.