Ross took on the Taxpayer Protection Pledge last night at AEI. Noah Kristula-Green summarizes the terms of the debate:
Norquist was clear: the pledge has been effective at getting Republicans to hold a hard line against tax increases and that the overwhelming majority of Republicans in Congress are committed to the principles of the pledge. This is true! Sure spending has not been brought far enough down, but now it’s clear that taxes are indeed off the table. Douthat countered that when you look at the record, the pledge has done nothing to actually restrain the growth of government and it does not actually protect the best interests of the taxpayers. As he stated: “There’s this nagging problem that conservatives keep cutting taxes without cutting spending, and that spending has sort of blown up into a sort of world historical challenge facing the United States.”
Douthat follows up with some praise for his opponent:
Norquist deserves some points for his consistency. He has the virtues of a monomaniac as well as the vices: Because he cares about taxes and only about taxes, he’s willing to entertain some of the hard choices that more flexible Washingtonians are eager to evade. I’m thinking of defense spending, in particular, where there is a large swathe of conservative opinion that seems convinced that we can have (if you will) Ron Paul’s domestic policy and Max Boot’s foreign policy — a group that howled when John Boehner contemplated striking a grand bargain with Obama on taxes and howled anew when the more modest “sequester” bargain ended up threatening defense; a group that generally denies the existence of any connection between the size of the security state and the non-security public sector; a group that believes it can persuade the American people to accept drastic cuts to Medicare not for the sake of national solvency, but in order to free up money to police the Khyber Pass.
The Dish 