Kevin Bohn writes for CNN: “The king of making candidates and officeholders sign pledges on the Republican side is Grover Norquist, who runs Americans for Tax Reform. ‘The American taxpayers are a powerful force. They don't want their taxes raised. Obama and the Democrats have a fight with the American people, not with me,’ Norquist said on CNN's ‘The Situation Room.’ All but one of the presidential contenders, 236 members of the House and 41 senators have signed the ‘Taxpayer Protection Pledge,’ created in 1986. By signing it, a candidate or elected official vows to oppose and vote against tax increases.”
Kate Bommarito writes for Plains Daily: “According to Ryan Ellis, Tax Policy Director of Grover Norquist’s conservative group Americans for Tax Reform, the Washington Post ‘read a little bit too much into a question that we answered’ last week when it published an article on July 20th stating that Norquist did not believe that a vote to let the Bush tax cuts expire would violate the pledge that many Republican lawmakers have signed vowing not to vote for a tax increase. The statement caused conservatives familiar with Norquist’s group to do a double take, wondering why the anti-tax crusader would say such a thing. ‘A lot of the tax rates we enjoy currently are living on borrowed time and are set to expire in January, 2013,’ Ellis began explaining in an interview with Rob Port on the Scott Hennen show Monday. ‘And the question that was posed to us was ‘What happens if that happens? Has someone broken their pledge at that point?’’ Since the taxes are set to expire without any vote being taken, Ellis said that logically, no one has violated their pledge by voting to raise taxes; no one has voted at all. Norquist’s answer should not be inferred to mean that Republican legislators would not be breaking their pledges if they did vote for legislation that contained tax increases.”