YouSaid · the spoken record

Grover Norquist

lines on the record: 79
first: 2017-05-25
most recent: 2017-05-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“System and go to a territorial tax system and bring that money back. So I think $2 trillion, I think I don't think it all comes back, but $2 trillion flowing back in would be tremendously helpful to the economy and then allowing that money to flow back regularly tax-free would create a lot of jobs and a lot of opportunity and really kickstart the economy in a helpful way.”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends how you write them. The House bill is even on deficits out into the future. There are some changes that are not completely clear that Trump has. You can, if you grow at 4% a year for a decade instead of 2% a year for a decade, the government nets $5 trillion more $5.5 trillion more than it would have with the 2% growth. So if you get substantial growth, you actually end up with a fair amount of additional revenue coming in. The other thing is when people get jobs, they also are not on welfare or welfare means tested programs. So there is a savings as people move to self-sufficiency rather than dependency. But there's also more revenue comes in from more growth. The other thing is we've got two and a half trillion, some people say more than that, trapped overseas until we get rid of our worldwide tax.”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, lots of reforms to be done. I think the tax cut will be very helpful, but also important is the deregulation. The changes at the FCC for some time are going to be more important than the changes at the Supreme Court. That's 15% of the economy. The changes at the FDA. You want more investment in science and so on. Get the FDA. So by deregulation.”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is my understanding that it is both his position at the time and now that he's not talking about changing it for people who are on it now. If we don't change it for people who are under 55 or 50, the whole thing collapses in the next 20 years. So somebody needs to have a reform before the day is over.”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On his position on Medicare, which is he doesn't want to change it for anybody who's on Medicare now. I just think that's politically sensible. At some point, I'd go with what Alice Riskin and Monopolies don't do very well, but I'm not”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Limited. But you asked me if I cared that he took it off the table and I'm just saying no because it's not on the table. I think we should have done what Bush wanted to do was let young people take their FICA taxes and put it in a 401k. Other countries do this and have done very well with it.”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, his commitment was not to do anything on Social Security. Social Security requires 60 votes because when they did the fix back in 83, they said now take 60 votes. So you can't deal with Social Security. You can't reform Social Security or change it. Because that's not what he didn't say.”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“could do in terms of bringing the number of bureaucrats down as we've dropped the number of uniformed soldiers, sailors, and airmen. If we bring it back to just two thousand ratios, tooth to tail, you could save about $160 billion over a decade. So we've got an awful lot more guys in the bureaucracy of the Pentagon than you need. And you could do that through attrition. Calvert has a bill to do that. McCain tells me it'll go into his bill as well. So there's a lot of savings to be made. I think we should focus on that rather than trying to get into people's pockets. Look for more.”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's entirely possible. The other thing we have to look at in a country the size of the United States is we have trillions of dollars of value in land and things under the land and under the water around. The government can sell off a lot of property and a lot of the mineral and gas rights offshore as well as on federal land as is done on private land and on state land, which tremendously increases jobs and opportunities. And you can use that to pay down debt or buy other things. There's a whole series of project lines where the government could devolve itself of assets. Taking a look at the military spending, the Calvert bill would reduce the number of civilian Pentagon employees, their $700,000. We haven't reduced the civilian bureaucracy as since the end of the Cold War, or since we won the Cold War. The other team didn't quit. They lost. But then take a look at what we...”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well first of all you start by fixing the problems that we have. twenty percent of gas tax money is diverted out of roads. Stop that. Another 20% goes to Davis Bacon. Stop that. When you fix that, come and talk to me about whether you might need more money. But no discussions about more money. Why are you pissing away 40%?”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's why they don't do the bridges. That's why they don't do the dikes and they don't do these things because they're spending the money on other things to get themselves elected.”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think when you look at any of these questions, you say what are the things the government's doing that get in the way of achieving the stated goal by politicians? Oh, I want to do this. And when you offer the politicians a way to get there that gives people more freedom and lower taxes, they go, no, I didn't mean that. I wanted more control. All of the infrastructure stuff that you're talking about, look at the governors and the senators who don't spend the extra dollar on infrastructure. They spend it on other things. Infrastructure is what they hold hostage. Roads are what they hold hostage. You say, you give me money, I'll give you roads. But you don't give me money. I'm not giving you more roads. When a politician said he won't do infrastructure or roads unless you give him more money and taxes, he's telling you that everything in the present budget is more important to him than Rhodes are. That roads are his least priority, the lowest priority that he has. And that's quite true for most of these politicians, Rhodes is the lowest priority.”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You'd have to look at one. Over what period of triangle? And two, are we looking, are we paying off special interests and we're spending the money, but we're spending it so poorly that we could with the amount of money we have today get the same product.”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, actually, if you look at the president's campaign website and his writing sense, he's talking about a trillion dollars and about two-thirds plus of that is private money that he wants to leverage with taxpayer dollars. So it's not trillion dollars for the appropriators to go and if he were to”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, you don't need new revenue when we're talking about overspending by twenty to forty percent. You could get 20 to 40 percent more highways, more roads, more pipes by getting rid of corrupt loss and wasteful loss. And pipelines and railroads and refineries. There's a lot of stuff to be done here.”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I'm giving you 20% more roads by getting rid of a racist law from the 1930s designed to keep black people from working in the North. And that law should be repealed because it's ugly and that law should be repealed because it loots taxpayers. Then another 20% of your road taxes are diverted into non-road stuff, which is either questions of subways or other things that aren't roads, but a whole series of when you pay gas taxes, a lot of that money is taken out, doesn't go to gas taxes, it goes to the Davis-Bacon Act, it goes to non-roads. So when people say, I want more roads, the answer is that's not what politicians give you when you give them gas tax money. They give you other stuff. Wisconsin before Walker came in the 10 years before Wisconsin, the Democrats took a billion dollars out of Rhodes and spent on other things. And they turned around and said, Grover, yeah.”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trillion bucks is still a lot, even in today's. That's over the next 30, 40 years that you have to do that. Go to Rhodes, the Davis Bacon Act raises the cost of all roads unnecessarily by about twenty percent, it was a racist law. But you still need money to...”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are state laws. Chicago has some of the worst laws on this which mandate how you make the pipes because 100 years ago this made sense and they didn't have plastic and they're now in cities that have open competition for big metal pipes or plastic pipes. It costs about 25 to 28% less for every mile that you do this stuff.”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am supportive of dramatically improving our infrastructure, starting. We have $1.3 trillion of waterworks that need to be replaced sewage water and drinking water.”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But looking at the present situation, we have a whole bunch of, we've just had eight years of a war on infrastructure where efforts to build pipelines were stopped by the EPA and by the government. We're now finally finished that pipeline, the North Dakota Access Pipeline. I was up in North Dakota. That increases the value of every barrel of oil in North Dakota, North Dakota, by $3 to $4. It means a lot to the state of North Dakota. It means a lot to the people of North Dakota. And that was held up for political reasons and thousands and tens of thousands of people were damaged because of that. That pipeline that now comes down through Nebraska, the Keystone pipeline, is going to provide energy assurance from Canada. You don't have to buy your energy from dangerous places.”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you have the railroads were built with private money, the government granted land to people. I think probably would have been wise to sell it since people got rich with those railroads. But as we did make land available to people, No, but not if the government's giving him a subsidy. That's not acceptable.”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where they go to school. Yeah, I'm not arguing for no taxes. The question is do private schools cost less than public schools? Do they have wildly? Fewer bureaucrats working for them, the number of bureaucrats at Catholic school system in New York versus the New York school system.”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of them do, and it's the interesting question If you only had the charter school as an option, they've been closing Catholic schools around here as people go into charter schools because you can't get the voucher to go to parochial schools. So they've been starving the religious private schools in Chicago and other major cities. So I think step back and say, how do you maximize liberty? And I think the most important thing we can do is let every parent choose, this is what education savings accounts do now past a number of states. Indiana has pretty much vouchers for everybody and they're building that in Wisconsin. You're seeing that in Arizona, I would leave it up to parents to decide whether they want to go to a religious school, a public school, what kind of private school, secular private schools, and have that, and that's the most important education reform. I think that's much more important than...”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right now it seems to me that you were to allow a public school to compete with homeschooling, parochial schools, private schools, charter schools and so on.”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, but there's a difference between should everybody be fed and should the government run the farms. Should the government require you to go to the school that they assign you to, or should have parents have the rights to say, if we're going to collectively spend $5,000 at that $10,000 per child on education, can a parent decide to go to a Catholic school if they're Catholic? But that's a different issue. Should there be public schools?”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay. Yes, I think it's important to have a national defense, keep the Canadians on their side of the border, protect the borders of the United States. And I think it's important to have a judicial system that's not corrupt and functioning to enforce the rule of law. We should have prisons for people who commit violent crimes, not for people who we dislike. Beyond that, the government should protect people's rights to live their own life as they see fit. And”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you also had when Clinton, when they were doing the banking stuff during the Clinton years, they were requiring people to make bad loans in order to do mergers. So you had the deregulation with the, oh, but we won't let you merge unless you do all the bad loan stuff and reducing the amount of capital had to buy houses. I mean, that was the way over leveraging part. If we'd skipped on that, we wouldn't have had the challenge. That's what needs to get fixed.”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fanny and Freddie May did exactly what conservatives said would happen to Fanny and Freddie May, and they went bankrupt and we had a crash. nothing to do with the tax cuts. But you're right. Look at the two tax cuts. The first one was a bunch of tax credits out, which did reduce the pressure to spend. But the second one was the pro-growth tax cut. That was the cut in the dividends and the cut in capital gains. And during that period, you saw growth jump over 3% for four years in a row. And the government's revenue was higher after at the end of four years than the government had projected with no tax cut and significantly higher than the CBO projected with a tax cut. So actually that is one tax cut that actually paid for itself. But it was Bush's responsibility. He failed to focus on Fannie and Freddie. Those things should be broken into ten different pieces and sold off. The good news is that the Trump people get that. We can't ever let that happen again.”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and at the end of the Carter years and at the end of the Obama years, left of center economist announced it's the end of growth, its limits to growth. We were told that at the end of Carter, and then we had Reagan's 4% growth. We'll see, but I think if we get anything that looks like Trump's tax cut, 15% corporate rates, and his approach towards regulations or deregulation, his choice is to read the FDA and the FTC and the FCC and FERC are going to dramatically reduce the regulatory burden by hundreds of billions of dollars in the economy. I think we can do very well on economic growth. And it's better to grow away from overspending than to have to cut it, but also you don't cut government spending, you reform it so it costs less.”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. If, first of all, government spends about federal government spends about 20% of GDP, and I think we could take that down dramatically over 25 years two ways. One is the cost of the deadweight cost of government is spending as a percentage of the economy. If the economy, if we had the present government, the economy was twice as big, the government would not be as difficult for people to pay for. It wouldn't be as oppressive to people in the way it operated, and it wouldn't slow economic growth. A bigger horse you can carry the same package a lot more easily. And so one in 25 years, if you grow at 4% a year instead of 2% a year, you dramatically increase the size of government, and spending as a percentage GDP without changing the amount of money you're spending or allowing to go up with inflation has dropped significantly. We had taken”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, because Congress can change anything they want to. I mean, if you're talking about an emergency, if the no and the flood that Canada attacks us so viciously as they often threaten to do, what war are you talking about necessity? Well, I mean, look, I mean”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The federal government takes eighteen nineteen percent of GDP and taxes, and the amount of money that it misspends or spends on less important things. If something's an emergency, it's more important than the day-to-day projects of the day. Or it's not”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hard to think he believed that because he turned to Sanu and asked if it would be okay and Sununu said he'd cover for the right. And his first reaction was not to go along with a tax increase. But Dartman was the smartest man in the world and talked him into it. But Darmin didn't pay the penalty. Darmin didn't lose his job over this. Bushed it. Look, no one's life is a complete waste. Some people serve as bad examples. And George Herbert Walker Bush is the guy who made this sacrifice and in ninety four we had ivory soap percentages of the modern Republican Party House and Senate taking the pledge. And we've had 90% of Republicans and Senators taking the pledge ever since. And the modern Republican Party has become the party that will not raise your taxes. Under any circumstances.”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I had allowed in to the text, meaning I hadn't objected. I mean, I didn't have a vote. These are the delegates, right? And they said the tax increase was a mistake, and we're against tax increases. Bush had the previous week, said the tax increase was a mistake. So I get a call middle of the night from Jim Sicone, James Baker's deputy. What are you doing? I'm sleeping. Why? And you let they said it was a mistake. I said, the president said it was a mistake. Only the president is allowed to say that the president made a mistake. So the next day they had to walk it back and they had these congressmen who had been there. Ms. Vin Weber was part of this. I didn't think I was letting something slide that was a secret, that it was a mistake.”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think they called us up Your job was to report back to Central to see if any of the officers were conspiring against you and wanted to make their own decisions or something”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not particularly I was at the, I mean I've been at a lot of the conventions helping on the platform stuff. Oh yes I was the platform and we had this discussion and we got I was overseeing as the political commissar for the tax and spending part of the”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, no, there were many. But Bush, if he'd not said, I'm running, I'm going to govern and run as Reagan, I don't think would have been competitive. He started behind. And so he did get elected in 88, promising not to raise taxes. Then in 90, he raised taxes and dramatically increased spending. So he writes in his books about how he was raising taxes in return for spending cuts. Spending rose more after the tax increase than it was scheduled to go before the tax increase. The tax increase fed spending increases. So he raised taxes, increased the debt, increased spending, all of which was punished in 1992 when he lost to a little-known guy out of Arkansas. What did you do?”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, he did win But he was down 14 points, and then he said, Read my lips no new taxes. He said, I'm going to govern as Reagan. And then Reagan run a third term, unfortunately.”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“died, retired, moved on, and new people who came into political action and paying attention to what's going in politics, living through Carter's failures and Reagan's successes, I'm with him, I'm with that guy. That's what it means to be a Republican today. When I grew up, Reagan was the right wing of the Republican Party beyond the pale, as far as Massachusetts was concerned. And then he became the modern Republican Party or the modern Republican Party, adopted his worldview. Then you had Bush who was losing in 1988 by 14 points when I had to go to my Harvard reunion and face all the Dukakis supporters mocking me for supporting this Yale guy.”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was central, but it also came at the right time. When Reagan came into Washington, DC, he was one of a handful of Reagan Republicans in Washington. There are only a few congressmen or senators who would have defined themselves as Reagan Republicans, maybe Laxalt. So after eight years and then ten years, 8890, you had a bunch of Congress when its senators retire, and then you had new Congress when it senators. Nobody changes their mind. People die. So it wasn't just that people in Washington looked around and changed their mind. It's that people who'd grown up pre-Reagan.”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chat with. But then when I created the pledge for the eighty sixth election, I realized that we had now begun the process of branding the modern Republican Party because we had just about half of the House and Senate committed to never, not in the next year, never. As long as I'm in office, voting for a net tax increase. That meant the next tax reform would be that much easier because we'd have protection against it becoming a hidden tax increase. And then we built from there.”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It has, it has, yes So that was the thought, but when I was 12, no one was paying any attention to my thesis. And it was after we got the pledge going. Where do you go with”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, sort of. What it was when I was 12, a young person, I was on a bus coming back from school and the teachers had been berating us saying democracy doesn't work. Nobody knows who their state legislator is. People vote for nothing, they don't know. And I thought, well, I don't know who my state legislator is, and I understand not everyone knows who their congressman is because the teacher was giving a statistics on this subject. But what if the Republican Party became the party that would never raise your taxes and would brand itself that way? Then, and if you could maintain quality control, then you might be able to get close to 50% based on party affiliation because the party would mean something and then to get to win, you go campaign a lot, talk about other issues, and so on. I thought that that would be a good base for a party that said, you know, vote for the Republican. He may invade small countries you can't pronounce, or he can't pronounce.”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't ask for notarization, but... Perhaps someday. Right now we've only had one real problem, that was George Herbert Walker Bush. Everybody else has been to that.”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“minimize the danger of that. And that's where the taxpayer protection pledge came from. It was designed specifically to help pass the 86 bill to say we got 100 congressmen and 20 senators to sign two witnesses dated signed. I will vote against any and all efforts. There does have to be no rights or”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obama set up an organizing for change, organizing for America? Okay, Reagan set up the Reagan administration guys set up Americans for tax reform. They put together a board, they put together budget, and then they asked me to run it. And our goal was this was an 85, and our goal was to pass what became the 1986 Tax Reform Act. And in organizing that, and before I had run the National Taxpayers Union between college and business school, and I'd been involved in taxpayer issues for some time back in Massachusetts, prop two and a half there. So there, we set this up, and then during the 2006 year, I realized we had a challenge. Some Republicans fear that if you reduced rates and broaden the base, eliminated ductions and credits, that having lost the protection of deductions and credits, that the rates would creep back up again. How does one...”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's different because the question on abortion is not whether people should have rights or not. It's a question of how many people there are. I mean, I don't know anyone who says there are two people and you should be able to kill one. And I don't know anybody who thinks there's only one person and you should make her have a baby. So the question is, are there two people? If they are, they both have rights. If there's only one person, then she has rights. So that's not a political question, it's a theological or scientific question. And that's why, unlike other issues, there are pro-life Democrats and there are pro-choice Republicans. But other issues are sorting out much more than that one does.”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It didn't happen though. When you look at 2004, matter of fact, the increase in Republican turnout in every one of those states was below, it was a general three point up for Bush. And the only states where that appeared maybe what happened would be Utah and Louisiana, neither of which were contested states in the presidential election. The other states actually went the other way. I looked into that at the time because I was writing a book about”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those are the two questions. Yeah. You raised the two points that people do when I explain the modern center-right, the modern Reagan Republican Party. It's a collection of people who, on their vote moving issue, wish to be left alone. What does that mean about abortion and what does that mean about gay rights? I think on gay rights, you saw the melting of the opposition to the idea of gays being able to lead lives and being left alone. It happened rather quickly as things happen historically because the people who had questions or objections to that, it wasn't a vote moving issue for them. It wasn't a vote moving issue. They might have said, well, you asked me what I think, I'll tell you. I'm against X. You didn't ask if I vote on that. And, I mean, name somebody who lost an election over the subject.”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They didn't get all sorts of arguments. I'm on the board of directors of National Rifle Association. I know gun people who have, in my view, the oddest views of free trade with China. But they don't vote on free trade. They vote on the Second Amendment. So it's not necessary to have an argument with them about the virtues of free trade. People are in on their vote moving issue.”
2017-05-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 150 - Grover Norquist · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source