I would characterize my relationship with longtime newspaper columnist and now Sacramento Bee Editorial Page Editor Dan Morain as a good one. I appreciate him for his willingness to take on anyone or anything if he smells a rat. He is also an exceptional writer. I think he appreciates me for my candor and my consistency. We disagree mightily on a number of policy areas — but that is to be expected since he part of the media’s liberal elite (Dan LOVES it when I generalize about him – not). Yesterday he had a column in the Bee entitled, Missteps on candidate questionnaires can cost elections, in which Dan offers up a shellacking of special interest groups, especially public employee unions, for their lengthy and specific candidate questionnaires, and takes a big issue with the fact that they are all filled out in secret — the public has no idea about what commitments or promises have been made by the people before them on the ballot. He does note an exception, which is the Americans for Tax Reform No Tax Pledge. In the second paragraph of his column he blasts the ATR pledge, saying, “Democrats attack him for it, and many pundits, including me, blame him [Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform] and his ilk for much of what’s wrong with the body politic.”
Enter the ATR pledge. Signing this pledge to the voters, which is short and succinct, makes it abundantly clear to the electorate that a candidate is serious about standing up for the protection of taxpayers. There is no wiggle room, frankly.
Another reason why the pledge is particularly helpful — is that pledge signers have their oath to the voters to use as a powerful shield against the special interests that dominate the state capitol who will lobby, ply, cajole or threaten legislators to increase the size and scope of state government. This pressure on Democrats comes most ardently from labor unions. On the GOP side, it comes often from big business groups who promote some taxes to avoid others that will more adversely impact their specific industry. A great example would be the 2009 debacle where big business lobbied for a budget deal that smacked broad-based income, sales and car taxes on Californians while at the same time setting up a billion dollar sweetheart tax break for many businesses. A more recent example would be where hundreds of millions in annual car taxes and fees were set to expire next year, but somehow enough Republicans went up to pass a seven year reauthorization of them (that’s $2.3 billion total) after heavy lobbying from business interests, who, you guessed it, feast off of much of the proceeds. (In Sacramento, when you can’t stop a regulation, apparently it is en vogue to simply get someone else to cover the cost of it — you know, “Don’t tax me, tax the guy behind the tree.”)
The pledge is mocked by many. There are those on the left, who unbelievably think that Californians are “under taxed” and hate the idea that someone would be so “rigid” as to rule out any tax increases as a matter of course. Then there are those who are the “deal makers” — they seek to bring together grand achievements under the banner of “bipartisanship” (or “post-partisanship) which almost always have at their center a “revenue” mechanism of a tax increase (I can hear it now — “Want to reform pensions? We need to raise taxes. Want to fix the prison system? We need to raise taxes. Want to make cuts? We need to raise taxes.”).
There are some who attack the pledge as not really being a promise to voters, but rather some sort of “oath of fealty” to people like Norquist, or to a blogger like yours truly. This is a bunch of hooey. This is just a way to not only attack the pledge, but to impeach the integrity of every candidate and officeholder who signs it.
And to circle back around to Morain’s point – as distasteful as he finds the no tax pledge — it is public. It’s public because it is not a pledge to a special interest group, but a pledge to the voters. And as you are assessing the candidates on the ballot this year, you should ask the candidates if they have signed it.