Norquist disagrees. On the website for his organization, Americans for Tax Reform, Norquist predicts independent voters, or the “silent majority,” will support the bill at the polls on November 8, when it will be decided by the veto referendum Issue 2.

However, Norquist also seems misinformed about the bill itself.  He identifies as the “major tenets” of the bill three clauses: SB5 would require public employees to pay at least 15 percent of their health-care costs, 10 percent of their pensions (by eliminating pension pick-up) and would mandate merit-based raises over automatic-pay increases.

While the law, passed in March, does indeed include those reforms, few would identify them as its “major tenets.”  SB5 severely restricts collective bargaining, prohibiting negotiations on minimum staffing, pension pick-up and classroom size for teachers.  It also ends the practice of third-party binding arbitration, instead allowing management to implement their last offer if negotiations reach an impasse. In addition, SB5 would criminalize strikes for all public employees with heavy fines and even imprisonment.

“No longer do government workers take less pay but better benefits for the opportunity to perform a public service,” wrote Norquist.  “Now they get great benefits and a bigger paycheck than the rest of us, with nearly no accountability to those of us paying the bills.” (According to the IRS (PDF), Norquist receives a $200,000 salary from his foundation for 24 hours of work per week, and an additional $22,419 in “other compensation” from ATR and “related organizations.”)

But highlighting the increases on health care and pension-matching actually identifies some of the least meaningful parts of the bill, as most public employees in Ohio already pay 10 percent of their pensions and 15 percent of their health care, and have been voluntarily conceding pay raises and benefits for years.

Municipalities that are short on cash have also long been allowed the flexibility to pick up some or all of an employee’s pension in lieu of higher wages, which increases the cost of the employee through higher payroll tax obligations and paying more for overtime.

In another post from Nov. 2, Norquist also blastes Republican David S. Smith, mayor of the small Ohio city of Lancaster, for a comments he made to The American Independent in which he said “SB5 doesn’t save the day for anybody,” as well as his decision to put a .25-percent local income tax increase before residents of his town. Lancaster recently had to lay off 13 firefighters and close a fire station, and, due to budgetary constraints, has been unable to fill police billets to replace officers that had retired.

“Soon after the layoffs of 13 city firefighters because of spiraling labor costs, Mayor Smith opted to push a large tax hike rather than concede that Issue 2 will prevent such sudden layoffs and preserve response times for police and fire fighters,” wrote Norquist.  “Apparently Mayor Smith has not been paying much attention to current events in Columbus, so I offer a quick primer: Republicans chose to balance the state budget without painful tax increases, in fact reducing Ohio’s overall tax burden.”

Smith told The American Independent unions had voluntarily opened up their contracts and made repeated concessions, including picking up more of their health-care costs and foregoing pay raises for the last two years. In fact, Smith blamed the state budget for his city’s financial woes: The Kasich administration cut the Local Government Fund, which distributes sales taxes collected throughout the state, by half.

Norquist’s organization, founded at the request of former President Ronald Reagan, is opposed to all tax increases as a matter of principle, according to the mission statement on its website.

Late last year, Judson Phillips of Tea Party Nation came to Eric Odom with a proposition. Odom’s group, the American Liberty Alliance–a free market, anti-tax group launched in March 2009, after its leaders had helped put together the first Tea Party protests–could sign on with the National Tea Party Convention that Phillips was organizing. ALA could promote the convention on its website and to its members. In return, it would become a “gold co-sponsor” of the convention, which would cost any other sponsor $5,000. That status would let Odom join other activists backstage with Sarah Palin, the event’s big-ticket speaker, before she gave her Saturday evening address. Odom signed up, and ALA joined the conservative women’s group Smart Girl Politics as the most prominent Tea Party groups promoting the event.

On January 12, Odom had to rethink his position. In the morning, he tried to convince local leaders of ALA that, despite some bad press coverage, the event was worth supporting. But at 2 p.m., Nashville-based Tea Party activist Kevin Smith posted a 6,700-word article on the “story behind Tea Party Nation’s dishonest beginnings.” In Smith’s account, Tea Party Nation had become a scam, promoting its own welfare while alienating local grassroots activists. The high cost of the convention–full-access tickets were $549, while access to Palin’s speech alone was $349. “It’s become clear to me that Judson and his for-profit Tea Party Nation Corporation are at the forefront of the GOP’s process of hijacking the tea party movement,” Smith wrote. “How can I honestly object to this same behavior in my Government and demand they clean up Washington when I am unwilling to risk the personal and political injury it takes to expose the fraud, corruption, and deceit to which I am privy?”

Smith’s attack on Tea Party Nation jumped from e-mail inbox to e-mail inbox. Hours later, 25 of ALA’s organizers told Odom that they wanted to pull out of the convention. Shortly after midnight, Odom announced that that ALA was quitting the convention because “when we look at the $500 price tag for the event and the fact that many of the original leaders in the group left over similar issues, it’s hard for us not to assume the worst.”

Since the first announcements about the National Tea Party Convention in November 2009, the high-priced, first-of-its kind event has been a magnet for controversy, a divisive subject within the burgeoning movement, and a punching bag for local and national media. Those three factors have complemented one another, as angry activists like Smith, Florida organizer Robin Stublen, and California organizer Mark Meckler have attacked the convention in very public forums. The attacks have remained one-sided as Phillips has blown off questions about the criticism. He has not responded to multiple phone calls and e-mails from TWI and from other outlets such as TPM Muckraker. Asked to confirm that Palin was being paid $100,000 to appear at the event, Phillips only told Politico that its reporters’ sources were “not reliable.” The result: A steady stream of negative press that has been circulated inside the movement, culminating in the high-profile withdrawal of ALA.

“I think it is a great con of people making money off the passions of others,” said Erick Erickson, the editor of RedState.com and sponsor of the biannual RedState Gathering convention, in an e-mail to TWI. “A $500+ per person fee to a for-profit organization run by people most people have never heard of is neither populist nor accessible for many tea party activists. It smells more like a scam using Sarah Palin to build legitimacy while lining pockets with money from hard working tea party activists.” After talking to TWI, Erickson put up a blog post making the argument in even more detail.

“When I’ve talked to our members, they’ve said this is entirely too expensive,” said Jenny Beth Martin, the national coordinator of Tea Party Patriots. The decision not to participate was made in a December conference call with members. “I’m sure there are other people in the movement who haven’t given as much, haven’t been organizing events, and may feel more comfortable spending that money, going to see some speakers, and getting that training. But we’re focusing on a grassroots response to the State of the Union and on the next round of Tea Parties on February 27.”

But as humiliating as the National Tea Party Convention’s coverage has been for activists, critics and attendees alike see the ambition and political strategy of their movement becoming more and more mainstream. Nine months ago, Odom got national headlines for pre-emptively denying RNC Chairman Michael Steele a speaking slot at the Chicago Tea Party. “We prefer to limit stage time to those who are not elected officials, both in government as well as political parties,” he said at the time. Today, Steele is winning a Tea Party Nation web poll on whether he should speak the convention, and Odom is gearing up for a trip to Massachusetts to help the Republican candidate, Scott Brown, take the state’s open Senate seat. The Tea Party Express, an operation of the GOP-supporting Our Country Deserves Better PAC which has been utterly rejected by some Tea Party activists, is rolling into the convention and catching hardly any flack for it. The presence of Palin, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) at the convention is seen, universally, as a coup with import that will outlive the controversy over the event itself.

“Having Palin speak at the convention works to to their mutual advantage,” said Morton Blackwell, the president of the Leadership Institute, an organization that trains conservatives (program veterans include James O’Keefe, the videographer who taped damaging exposes of ACORN) and is getting a discounted sponsorship at the National Tea Party Convention in return for holding free sessions. “It’ll help them get thousands of people there, I think. And the leadership of the Tea Parties, that I’ve talked to, do not believe that they should start their own party.”

Despite the negative press Palin has received for demanding so much money for her speech, there’s agreement that her presence will help convince activists that they need to work for Republicans. “Palin is actually more Tea Party than Republican Party, anyway–she walked away from the governor’s office, for crying out loud!” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform–which is still undecided on whether to support the convention, based on conflicting suggestions from local activists. “But it’s important that they realize that they don’t have to be friends with the guys they replace the Democrats with. They get them to run on their issues. That’s how you avoid third party movements.”

Some of the people planning to attend the convention are still considering whether third party challenges to the Democrats and the GOP are viable. David DeGerolamo of NC Freedom, who is spending “thousands of dollars” to travel from North Carolina to Nashville and run a breakout session on consolidating state Tea Party groups at the convention, speculated that it would be an ideal place to “weed out” people who had the money to challenge the two parties. “I’ll tell you,” said DeGerolamo, “the GOP here in North Carolina is scared to death about what will happen at the Tea Party Convention.”

But the chance of the Tea Party Convention becoming the start of a third party movement — something rumored for months and occasionally indulged by Palin — is remote. (On the January 13 episode of “Glenn Beck,” Palin admitted that “there are times that I have been tempted to bail from” the GOP but that she didn’t think third parties are viable.) The focus of detractors is on purifying the movement of buck-raking, but not Republican activism. The focus of convention defenders is While Kevin Smith’s explosive blog post warned against GOP exploitation, hours later the Louisiana Tea Party endorsed Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) for re-election.

“Sometimes, in conservative circles, you run into this purity test problem where any traction in political process is seen as selling out over principled,” said John O’Hara, a staffer at the libertarian Heartland Institute who helped organized the February 27 Tea Party in Washington, D.C. and whose book “New American Tea Party” hit shelves this week. “I’d hate to see the Tea Party relegated to a third party spoiler, and luckily I don’t think that’s happening.”

Neither Tea Party activists nor conservative movement figures who are linking up with them express much worry about the bad press the convention is getting. Some of the non-participants who’ve been quoted criticizing the convention, such as Adam Brandon of FreedomWorks, are fine with the media promoting the crusade of Odom, Stublen, and others while Brandon’s group quietly promotes its new PAC targeting vulnerable Democrats. “We wish them all the best, but we are too stretched on the health care bill,” Brandon told TWI.

And for all the bad press Tea Party Nation’s received, the very day the group announced extremely limited access for the media, its website revealed one profitable reason why.

“The First National Tea Party Convention is officially SOLD OUT!!!! You may place your name on the waiting list in the event additional tickets become available.”

Protesters at the 9/12 Tea Party in Washington, DC (Photo by Aaron Wiener)

Election night was bittersweet for Andrew Moylan. The young government affairs manager of the conservative National Taxpayers Union was watching returns in Asheville, N.C., with fellow attendees of the conservative State Policy Network’s annual meeting. Early in the night, the gubernatorial races in Virginia and then New Jersey went to the Republicans. Moylan, however, was watching the returns on two anti-tax, anti-spending ballot measures in Maine and Washington. Those weren’t turning out so well.

“I care a lot less about Republicans than I do about policy,” Moylan told TWI. “So it was depressing to watch those numbers come in.”

The numbers broke hard against conservatives and libertarians. The Maine Tax Relief Initiative–Question 4–would have placed new limits on state and local government spending and required voter approval to go over those limits. It failed by 21 points and a margin of more than 100,000 votes. Washington Initiative 1033 would have placed limits on local spending and directed surplus tax revenue back to Washingtonians, as property tax rebates. It failed by 11 points and a similar margin of around 100,000 votes.

[GOP1]One week after the election, the results in Maine and Washington are giving some conservative and libertarian activists pause–and giving some liberals hope–on the question of whether America is turning right in reaction to the Democratic agenda. Voters in those states, argued the liberal columnist E.J. Dionne, “decided not to be part of a laboratory experiment being pushed by the Beltway Right.” For their part, members of the “Beltway Right” did not express any great surprise at the results.

“They were massively outspent in both states,” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, “and it always takes a few tries to win these things.”

Reached by TWI, activists inside and outside of Maine and Washington pointed to both of those reasons for the defeats. But some of them wrestled with the contrast between these losses and the rise of the anti-tax, small government Tea Party movement. Conservative and libertarian activists are more visible and more organized than in any time in recent memory. Why weren’t they able to buck the expected opposition of labor unions and capitalize on what, they argue, is roiling voter discontent at high taxes and wasteful government? Some suggested that the nascent movement was focused more on the politics of Washington, D.C. than on local politics, and that this might be an error. Others admitted that Question 4 and Initiative 1033 may have gone too far.

“When you’re swinging for the fences,” said Tim Eyman, the key organizer of Initiative 1033, “it’s not out of line for voters to say no. What is the statistic about Babe Ruth? He had the most home runs, and he had the most strike-outs. I wouldn’t read too much into this, other than we were fighting for an audacious tax-limiting proposal, and there limits to what voters willing to do, regardless of how out of control they think their government is.”

Eyman, a longtime ballot initiative organizers in Washington, had a lot to lose from the failure of Initiative 1033. He took out a second mortgage on his house for $250,000, providing more than a third of the total funding for the campaign–the rest of it came locally, from tapped-out small donors. And while he did tap into the Tea Party movement for support, he didn’t find much money or much organization ready to compete with the eventual $3.5 million marshaled by the initiative’s opponents.

“The recession doesn’t effect tax-takers,” said Eyman, pointing to the Service Employees International Union and the National Education Association, both of whom opposed the initiative. “Taxpayers are having a difficult time. So the money wasn’t there.”

Kevin Morse, an organizer with Olympia, Washington’s Tea Party group, told TWI that Eyman had attended a June 27 Tea Party meeting and enlisted activists to put the initiative on the ballot–it made the deadline, and the target for signatures, two weeks later. In the months between then and the election, said Morse, the activists simply spent more time organizing and putting their emphasis on health care legislation, “because that’s where the press coverage goes.” Proving his point, Morse spent Monday afternoon protesting Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi at an appearance in the state.

“That $3.5 million the other side spent had a big impact, too,” said Morse. “If you need more proof, that’s why big money owns D.C. right now.”

Activists in both states pointed to the fearsome fundraising advantage of the initiatives’ opponents as reasons why they never really had a chance. In Maine, Question 4 backer Tarren Bragdon claimed that the measure’s opponents had a 12-1 cash advantage that they used to drive down support. Bruce Poliquin, a Republican gubernatorial hopeful for 2010 who worked on the Question 4 campaign, personally put up a quarter of its budget.

“The results were not a negative reflection on activists here in Maine,” he said. “We were outspent and we were outmaneuvered by interests from outside the state.”

Still, some of last week’s election results cut against the idea that money can make or break elections. In New Jersey, first-time candidate Chris Christie ousted Gov. Jon Corzine (D-N.J.) despite taking public financing and being outspent roughly 3-1. In New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg dramatically under-performed in the polls and nearly lost to Democratic candidate Bill Thompson despite outspending Thompson by a 16-1 margin. And while anti-tax initiatives are often battered by better-funded opposition campaigns, they often do better than Question 4 and Initiative 1033. In 2006, by many measures a better election year for liberals, a nearly identical measure in Maine failed by only 8 points. All of this pointed anti-tax activists to two other explanations–a lack of grassroots support and a smear campaign by opponents.

“I was surprised that the this movement against higher taxes, against higher spending, was not more focused on these measures,” said Paul Jacob, a longtime ballot initiative activist who now leads the Citizens in Charge Foundation. “I’m surprised wasn’t more effort to back them. There’s just been more attention paid to Congress, and people gravitate to where the attention is.”

The NTU’s Moylan paid some credit to the campaign initiative opponents had run in Maine and Washington, giving voters a dark history lesson on the Colorado Taxpayer Bill of Rights. That measure, passed in 1992, mandated that any tax increase that produced revenue higher than expected from the combined rate of population increase and inflation would be subject to a voter referendum. In the boom years of the 1990s, it was a trend-setter. But in 2000 and 2005, after the restrictions produced education funding cuts, voters did away with most of Colorado’s TABOR.

“The ‘No’ campaigns hammered away on Colorado,” said the NTU’s Andrew Moylan. “But when you start to dig into the history in Colorado, TABOR was not the cause of their problems.”

Anti-tax activists had a problem, said Moylan. Until they passed more tax-limiting initiatives, it would be tough to prove that they worked.

“If we had other states that had passed something like this, that were running smoothly and well, we’d have an easier argument to make. The other side has a 10-second talking point. We have a ten-minute explanation. Elections are about the 10-second talking points.”

“A major American company is making a contribution to the Obama administration in the form of an infomercial,” said Norquist, explaining why they’d organized the event.

Price marked the administration’s priorities as a potential “death knell” for private health care and worried that positive media coverage of the president was slanting the gameboard. “If the fourth estate in this administration remains in the tank for this administration,” he said, attacking ABC News, “it does endanger the future of our nation.”

Yesterday he signed a budget that did just that.

Florida’s budget for the upcoming fiscal year includes about $2 billion in tax and fee increases, including a $1 per-pack hike in the cigarette tax.

Crist is still trying to have his cake and eat it too, claiming that he still hasn’t supported a broad-based tax increase, since not everybody smokes — it is estimated that about 2 million Floridians smoke, or roughly one in five residents over 18.

The Americans for Tax Reform pledge for congressional candidates requires signers to “oppose any and all efforts to increase the marginal income tax rates for individuals and/or businesses … and oppose any net reduction or elimination of deductions and credits, unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing tax rates.”

Crist could get off on a technicality here since he’s not in Congress and the budget doesn’t raise income taxes. But wait, he did sign a different ATR pledge — one for governors — that requires signatories commit to “oppose and veto any and all efforts to increase taxes.”

Last month, ATR jumped all over Florida House leaders who signed the pledge and allowed the state budget to include tax increases.

Responsible legislators don’t raise taxes on their constituents, especially when they can least afford it.  Responsible people look to solve problems (cutting excessive spending), rather than looking to patch them with taxes on a declining source of revenue (cigarette taxes).

The Orlando Sentinel notes Crist invokes conservative demigod Ronald Reagan in his defense:

I view it more as a health issue than a tax issue … Ronald Reagan used to say if you want to kill something, tax it. It wouldn’t be bad if we killed smoking. It would save a lot of lives.

Crist might want to avoid comparisons to Reagan, lest Florida voters draw a connection to his vice president, George H.W. Bush, and the “Read my lips: No new taxes” debacle.

Update: Americans for Tax Reform spokesman Adam Radman emails the following statement:

[W]ith the signing of these bills, Crist has broken his Pledge at the state level. We’re disappointed Crist has broken his state pledge which he took to oppose all tax increases of whatever kind. He’s right though about the Federal pledge–it applies only to Federal income taxes. We’re hoping he’ll recommit himself to Florida taxpayers and do better with his Federal pledge than he has with his state Pledge.

“They absolutely did anything they could to stop me from coming here,” said Tancredo. “They hated the idea. That’s been the way they’ve done this for the last five years. Grover Norquist, they would rather have. That guy should be in jail.”

Tancredo explained that Paul Sperry’s book, Infilitration, about the influence of “Muslim spies” in Washington, is very damaging to Norquist. “How Grover Norquist has escaped indictment I will never know. If half of the stuff is true, and I believe it’s all true, he’s a dangerous guy. But they tout him here, especially on immigration.”

“You’re asking me to comment on what other people think,” said Wurzelbacher. “I can’t do that. He’s right that this plan is rewarding bad behavior, without a doubt. And I appreciated his passion when he was speaking.”

Several times, once without being prodded, Wurzelbacher lit into the presidential candidate who lifted him out of obscurity.

On the housing bubble:

John McCain likes to say: Well, I warned about this! Well, I didn’t hear him. And I listened. He might have said it in certain circles but I didn’t really hear him. If he was thinking that was really going to be something he ought have made a bigger stink than he did.

On the Straight Talk Express:

John McCain’s a politician. I don’t really have a whole lot of respect for politicians. I did not agree with the amnesty bill he tried to put forth before running. I thought it was just about the most asinine thing I’d ever heard. You go ahead and let people break laws, then you pardon them and welcome them in? It makes no sense.

Three years ago he was the favorite among Democrats. That always bothered me. Then he talks about reaching across the aisle. I’m tired of reaching across the aisle. You got voted in, supposedly, because of your ideas, your principles, your values, and yet you’re supposed to reach across the aisle and bend on those things to get things done? You don’t sit there and say, ‘I’ll give you Park Place for Boardwalk.’ There’s too much wheeling and dealing in politics. You don’t coerce, and see, that was my problem when I was on the bus. That was the word that was used on the bus. “Coerced.” That’s a bad word. When John McCain sat there and said, “Well, some senators had to be coerced,” that pissed me off. That really upset me.

On Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin:

Absolutely incredible woman. Actually really wants to serve America. Do I think she should give ‘em another chance? I dunno. I mean, America tore her up. The media in general. But of any of the politicians I’ve actually met she seems the most sincere. She actually wants to do what’s right for America. She didn’t have that gleam in her eye of power an money, she had that ‘I want to serve’ look. That’s the kind of character and leadership we need. When you go into politics you want to help your fellow man, not help yourself. I think I’ve got a pretty good B.S. detector and I didn’t smell any from her.

Wurzelbacher wasn’t thrilled by Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s GOP response to last night’s presidential address. “The only one I can see who I’d considering voting for is Newt Gingrich.”