In a discussion today with POLITICO's Mike Allen, Grover Norquist explained that he is not concerned about losing the tax debate as part of fiscal cliff negotiations and urged all negotiations to be in public and online. This would permit the public to know who is being reasonable throughout the process.

Here's the story from POLITICO's Kate Nocera:

“I’m not planning on losing the tax debate we’re having right now. But the tax issue will be more powerful in 2014, 2016 than today,” he said.

“You need to have this conversation in public, you need to be online so you can have the moral the higher ground,” he said. “This is kind of a déjà vu all … with the debt-ceiling thing. And people asked, ‘Do you want to default?’ And I said, ‘No, I want to save two-trillion dollars.’ Which is, by the way, what we did. And, by the way, we won that fight. We got the spending cuts and didn’t get a tax increase.”

He suggested Republicans should push for a one-year extension of all the Bush tax cuts and then demand that Congress come up with comprehensive tax reform as part of any deal to avert the fiscal cliff.

Norquist said by having negotiations in public, Republicans would be able to “change the playing field” from raising taxes to holding Democrats’ feet to the fire over spending cuts. Republicans could have the upper hand by challenging the President on not cutting spending.

“We have a spending problem, not a failure to raise taxes problem,” Norquist said.

Still Norquist said that revenue could be achieved through tax reform and economic growth. Raising taxes, he said, would not solve the country’s economic woes.

“I’m all in favor of real revenue, not imaginary revenue,” he said.

Posted by Paul Blair on Wednesday, November 28, 2012 5:53 PM EST

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