Happy Warrior

Republican agitator Grover Norquist on building a "leave-us-alone coalition"

Rick Henderson & Steven Hayward from the February 1997 issue

(Page 3 of 5)

Forbes is helping people. Sometimes by helping other people you help yourself. When you run for president you're asking everybody to help you.

Reason: You have taken some strong positions in support of immigration, despite some major divisions among people in your coalition. Why did you do this?

Norquist: We have to have a police state powerful enough to find everyone in the country and figure out who they are? Whoa, Nelly! There are some things that even if they were a good idea, to do them the government would have to be too big.

I've taken the strategically brilliant position [laughter] that I think is self-evident--eliminate welfare for immigrants, legal and illegal. What bothers most Americans is that they think immigrants come here to go on welfare and don't work. It doesn't bother them that there's x number of new swarthy looking people in the country. This does not keep them up at night.

I'm in favor of banning welfare for immigrants, legal or illegal, because I'm against welfare, period. If we like immigrants, we have to take this mark of Cain off them, that people think that they're on welfare. If we make the no-welfare-for-immigrants provisions stick, through the court challenges, then the next time someone in Congress gets up a head of steam and wants to clear out the immigrants, he's got fewer guys in his army.

Reason: But the Republicans' anti-immigration rhetoric may have cost the party Latino voters for a generation. How can the party get them back?

Norquist: We have to highlight that we're only going after welfare. Then we have to talk about other things. Pro-choice suburbanites don't mind pro-lifers, but they don't want to hear them talk about it all day. Hispanics don't mind Republicans discussing cutting off welfare benefits unless they hear them talk about it all day. In that case they think, "These guys really do have a hangup about me." We need to make it clear: immigration good, welfare bad. Welcome to the country. And if you don't want the government stealing your money, vote for me.

Pat Buchanan does come across--I hate to use the left's language--as mean-spirited.

Reason: He was also telling "Jose" to go home.

Norquist: Buchanan's used to bar fights. I could come back at him with some Irish slur and he would think it was a fair fight. Jose doesn't look at it that way. He doesn't look at this as a cute intellectual discussion.

Reason: In his recent book, your old friend Ralph Reed said he thought that passing the Communications Decency Act [banning "indecent" speech on the Internet] was a great victory for the family movement. ATR was one of the parties that sued to have the CDA declared unconstitutional. What happened there?

Norquist: The way I talked to him about this is that there is a private sector solution, which is screening software that parents install for the protection of their kids. The idea that the government should help parents protect their kids is inviting somebody into the house that ain't ever going away and certainly ain't limiting itself to regulation of the Internet.

As we get more used to the Internet it will also be easier to convince the family groups. Fear of the Internet is a false fear. You can't tell a parent that there's software that will keep your kid from looking at dirty pictures on the Internet, because he believes in his heart of hearts that his kid can break into anything, or should be able to, or knows someone who can. A couple years from now parents will understand it more, how much their kids can and can't do on the Internet. It will be less frightening.

Reason: Let's pick up this point on kids, because Arianna Huffington has written pro- censorship columns, in which she has said, the problem is not kids, it's adults. We don't want adults seeing this stuff. And Judge Robert Bork--another conservative icon--openly argues for censorship to protect adults.

Norquist: How many divisions does Bork have? How many divisions does Arianna Huffington have? The First Amendment can withstand any number of books or columns from Bork or Huffington.