It's a treat we get here in Oregon every four years, and it makes me a little sad to think we only get to watch it for another six days: Republican candidates competing to prove their loyalty to their national movement base like Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, and turning off most Oregon voters in the process.
Erstwhile moderate Repub Ron Saxton is trying to get to the right of social conservative Mannix by adding qualifiers to his support for reproductive choice and painting Mannix, improbably, as a tax-and-spend liberal in everything but the name.
Saxton's latest TV ad runs as follows:
"Newspapers call Kevin Mannix attacks on Ron Saxton a smear, sleazy. Is Mannix attacking to hide his $350,000 campaign debt, or his 83 votes to raise taxes? Eighty three votes for higher gas taxes, sales taxes, and Mannix opposed limiting property tax increases. Ron Saxton signed a no new taxes pledge. Ninety percent of newspapers endorse Saxton, calling him a fiscal conservative. If you want change, vote for Ron Saxton."(Haven't been able to find the ad online yet; when I do I'll link to it.)
A press release on Mannix's site assures us that he too signed the ATR's no-tax pledge, although the accuracy of Saxton's suggestion (i.e., that the fact that he signed such a pledge distinguishes him from Mannix) isn't really the point here.
The point is, come this fall, neither one of them is going to be bragging about ties to Grover Norquist, as investigations continue into the Republican sleaze machine created by Norquist, Jack Abramoff, and Tom DeLay. The only candidate who'll be interested in mentioning it--and oh, he will, at every opportunity--will be the Democrat.
And at a more fundamental level, the point is that "no tax" pledges are a gimmick, and about as honest, workable, and reliable as abstinence pledges, another far-right favorite.* Anyone who signs such a pledge and means it--saying, in effect, "I promise to govern with one hand tied behind my back"--isn't serious and doesn't deserve election. That would be as useless as a President who never used the veto. (Psych!)
Of course the presidential veto analogy really makes my point: The "no tax" pledge, like Bush signing a law he doesn't intend to obey, is fundamentally dishonest, and it corrupts the link between the will of the voters and the laws that are passed. True, Bush has not vetoed a single bill, even those he thought unconstitutional--but he did accompany his signature with hundreds of signing statements, a constitutional end-run first developed by Samuel Alito during the Reagan administration. In many of these statements Bush has declared that, for all intents and purposes, he does not consider himself bound by the very bill which his signature makes the law of the land. No, he doesn't veto; instead he pulls a constitutional fast one.
Same with "no tax" pledges. Even drown-it-in-the-bathtub extremists like Norquist still want some money coming into the government coffers to fund their pet projects. They just want to make sure the money doesn't come from the people on their speed dialers (i.e., the people living on capital gains and trust funds, and big corporations), but rather from the rest of us--the chumps. So in lieu of taxes, we'll pay surcharges, service fees, tolls, access charges, increased costs of privatized and poorly-regulated services, bigger co-pays, steeper deductibles--but, of course, no new taxes.
It's pretty simple, really: Vote for candidates who sign "no tax" pledges, and be a chump. Come November, Oregon voters can show that they get it.
*I forgot to include "term limits pledges," yet another empty Republican gimmick. And like the other faux pledges, it conceals the real problem: The upward-spiralling cost of privately funded campaigns and the disproportionate power of incumbency, especially when most districts have been scientifically rigged to make them safe.
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