Is grover over? Norquist's anti-tax jihad stumbles in the states.

• Author: Franklin, Daniel

If ever two men seemed to share one political soul, surely they were Grover Norquist and Mitch Daniels. From his perch as president of Americans for Tax Reform, Norquist was the architect of President Bush's strategy to cut taxes every year and has elicited signed promises from virtually every congressional Republican never to vote for a tax hike. Norquist once famously boasted that he hoped to "reduce [government] to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub? During Bush's first term, it was Daniels, the White House budget director, who began running the water. During his 6me in the White House, Daniels conceded nothing in arguing for the president's tax cuts, even going so far as suggesting that the president's trillion-dollar tax cut represented "our best chance of another unexpected surplus? So if the smile on Norquist's face seemed extra-wide on Election Day, even considering the Republicans' reinforced grip on Washington power, it might have had something to do with Daniels's election as governor of Indiana. Daniels was bringing Grover's jihad back to the Heartland.

Where he promptly dropped it. Daniels had campaigned touting citations from Norquist's ATR and other anti-tax groups. But eight short days after settling into the Indiana Statehouse, Daniels proposed a budget that sought to close a $600 million budget gap by socking high-income Hoosiers with a 29-percent increase in income tax. Norquist quickly accused his old cohort of "betraying" taxpayers with his budget proposal. "This is the fastest any governor claiming to be a Reagan Republican has folded under the pressure of the big-spending interests," Norquist said. Daniels was stung. "Two years ago, Grover was giving me the Hero of the American Taxpayer Award," Daniels lamented to the Indianapolis Star. "I'm the same guy I was then."

To bring pressure on the apostate, Norquist publicly and negatively compared him to other governors who he said hewed more closely to the doctrine that taxes can go in only one direction: down. "On behalf of Indiana's families and businesses," Norquist wrote Indiana state legislators, "I urge you to prevent Gov. Daniels from closing Indiana for business, and turn to people like [Texas] Gov. Rick Perry ... for alternative solutions?' But just four days later, it was Perry's turn to break Norquist's heart. Introducing a new tax program to the Texas Association of Businesses, Perry said Texas had a "once in a generation opportunity ... to put in place an educational system to really impact our children and our children's children."

Poor Grover. Nearly everywhere he looks, it seems, a Republican governor or legislature is finding the seductions of tax hikes too powerful to resist in the face of reduced federal support and soaring education and health-care costs. Anti-tax groups such as ATR, the Club for Growth, Americans for Prosperity, and Freedom-Works seem to have feet-on-the-desk privileges...