Politics/Defending the Left
Norquist, Grover G.
POLITICS j2,^"1 Cy"–, Defunding the Left by Grover G. Norquist Phyllis Schiafly is the president of Eagle Forum, the national grassroots organization that over the years has battled the Legal...
...It is also politically important for Republicans to cut spending on Republican pork—agriculture subsidies, rural electrification subsidies, and the continued government ownership of power companies through the Power Marketing Authorities, or PMAs...
...The American Spectator September 1995 57...
...t A s he moves to uproot programs like the Legal Services Corporation, John Kasich doesn't seem to be worried by such talk "Running a lawn mower over weeds shortens the weeds and may make it look like grass, but the weeds return," he says...
...When Legal Services lawyers sued to stop welfare reductions, alleging a right to welfare under the Ohio constitution, that might have been the last straw for Ohio Rep...
...The National Education Association, a Clinton loyalist from the start, received at least $385,000...
...These subsidies to rural America undermine Republican strength by leaving rural and fanning communities dependent on Washington...
...Its $412 million budget understates both its value to the left and its cost to taxpayers...
...In California, these efforts have met with success, and now the state can afford to hire more bureaucrats to lobby for still higher taxes...
...But a Democrat can always compete if subsidies are available to voters...
...the Teamsters, $3.5 million...
...Ernest Istook has called on Congress to limit recipients of federal aid to spend no more than 5 percent of their budget on lobbying...
...He's determined to "zero out" such politicized spending programs as the LSC, and by that he means total elimination—not some scheme that would allow the corporation to be cut back, phased out, or "reformed...
...John Kasich, chairman of the House Budget Committee...
...According to Wittmann, the federal government should not be in the business of funding any political activities—whether of the right or the left...
...Fully 22 percent flows to HIV/AIDS education that includes advertisements in gay publications and support for gay activist groups in major cities...
...To paraphrase Mae West, for the GOP, all budget cuts are good budget cuts...
...the Environmental Defense Fund, $341,000...
...By remaining in the private sector, those individuals will be more likely to lean toward the Republicans...
...Its spokesmen claim that its politics are paid for with "private" donations...
...Oklahoma's Rep...
...Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus and Peter J. Ferrara of the National Center for Policy Analysis note that the court cases brought by Legal Services lawyers have increased taxpayer spending on welfare, prisons, disability, Medicaid, and housing benefits...
...A Heritage Foundation scan of the Federal Assistance Awards Data System found that for the period July 1993-June 1994, the AFL-CIO received $2 million from taxpayers...
...Given that congressional funds rarely flowed to conservative groups in recent decades, conservatives and liberals alike understand perfectly well that any effort to remove taxpayer money from politics will ipso facto defund the left...
...As James T. Bennett of George Mason University discovered, the National Cancer Institute has also been giving money to the Advocacy Institute, a lobbying organization set up by Michael Pertschuk—a former top staffer to former Maine senator and Democratic presidential hopeful Edmund Muskie—to run campaigns in the states to raise taxes on cigarettes...
...the World Wildlife Fund, $789,692...
...A total of more than two trillion of the Federal government's five trillion dollar debt can reasonably be ascribed to the efforts of federally-funded Legal Service activists," they write, "whether by litigation, procuring of grants and contracts, grassroots organizing, lobbying, or legislative impact...
...Schlafly knows whereof she speaks when she calls the current congressional effort to defund the LSC an "acid test to demonstrate whether the new Republican majority really intends to reform and reduce big government...
...who in the 1980s saved Legal Services from Reagan's budget cutters time and again...
...Money for the National Cancer Institute was used on a political study of campaign contributions from tobacco companies...
...But the salaries of those people who traveled to endorse Democrats were paid with taxpayer money, as were the organization's rent, computers, and overhead...
...In 1993 alone, the Friends of the Earth received $35,000 from taxpayers...
...Larry Craig of Idaho has introduced legislation that would ban federal grants to organizations that lobby Congress...
...A billion dollars not spent means 20,000 federal employees not receiving an average compensation package of $50,000...
...M arshall Wittmann, who heads the Heritage Foundation's Government Integrity Project, likes to quote Jefferson's admonition: "To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical...
...By spending $200 billion less each year than the Clinton budget, the Republican budget will result in 4 million fewer government beneficiaries at $50,000 each...
...GOP Whip Tom DeLay has asked all Republican committee chairmen to "inquire of witnesses representing nonprofit advocacy groups, think-tanks and professional membership organizations as to whether or not they have received federal grants in the past three years...
...and the United Auto Workers, big backers of government-run health care, $805,000...
...Funds for the Centers for Disease Control that are approved with bipartisan support, on the theory that we are combating tuberculosis, are diverted to politics...
...Dues can be paid by lawyers to the National Lawyers Guild or the American Bar Association to further finance political activity with what began the day as non-political tax dollars...
...If it bothers Bill and Hillary Clinton that the Republicans are moving to defund the activist groups they had counted on for 1996, they can always think of it as campaign finance reform...
...The NCSC has been particularly active 56 The American Spectator September 1995 in elections, endorsing sixty Democrats in 1994...
...Signed into law in 1974, the Legal Services Corporation is the crown jewel of the taxpayer-funded liberal establishment...
...This $600,000 study, the Washington Times pointed out, duplicated a Common Cause study of the same issue...
...Using IRS statistics, Wittmann calculates that fully $39 billion of taxpayer money is dispersed annually to "organizations which may use the money to advance their political agendas...
...While labor unions continue to defy the Supreme Court's Beck decision to collect compulsory union dues that fund their political activity, big labor also pulls down big bucks from taxpayers who have avoided joining unions...
...Only 5 percent of the CDC's budget goes for tuberculosis...
...During the same period, the LSC's friends at the American Bar Association received $2.2 million in federal grants...
...Two of these are the predictable Texas Rep...
...One agency begged him, "Please just leave us with one dollar—the implication being that it could survive any cut, but not elimination...
...If not for farm and rural electrification subsidies, the Democratic Party could not elect a congressman or senator from states like North and South Dakota or Nebraska...
...Ending subsidies would close the Midwest, South, and rural West to Democratic congressional House and Senate candidates...
...For a conservative that's an easy argument to make...
...Assembled behind the LSC are legions of federally financed lawyers, an American Bar Association that collects dues from these lawyers, and their allies in and out of Congress...
...In the June 26 issue of the Nation, Pettschuk describes his Advocacy Institute as "developing a program to help progressive groups talk back to the libertarian right" Kasich also knows that the Republican budget will wreak massive damage on the establishment left—as will any serious effort to cut back the size of the federal government...
...POLITICS j2,^"1 Cy"–, Defunding the Left by Grover G. Norquist Phyllis Schiafly is the president of Eagle Forum, the national grassroots organization that over the years has battled the Legal Services Corporation over the Equal Rights Amendment and dozens of other issues...
...After forty years of ever more generous congressional funding to predominantly liberal groups, the debate over the future of the Legal Services Corporation is just part of a larger debate over defunding the left...
...lars are fungible, and once sent out from Washington, they can be essentially laundered from one foundation to a second and then a third...
...Much funding for the left travels under a false flag...
...Phil Gramm has promised to work in the Senate to kill all funding for the LSC...
...and the National Resources Defense Council, which fanned the flames of the Alar apple scare, $75,000...
...Charlie Stenholm, who never fails to provide the liberal Democratic leadership with "moderate" cover, and former New Hampshire Senator Warren Rudman (R-N.H...
...The 60 Plus Association, a conservative organization of senior citizens, has pointed out that the National Council of Senior Citizens, originally started by retired labor union officials and the Democratic National Committee, now receives 96 percent of its total funding from the federal government—more than $68.7 million in 1993-1994...
...0 utside of the budget process itself, House Republicans are coming up with novel ways to locate and root out political spending...
...As theright contemplates legislative battles and congressional elections against a left reduced to financing itself through voluntary donations, the left will have little to fall back on other than cries of witchhunt and enemies lists...
...Still, there's a huge funding machine that needs dismantling...
...Such disclosure would make the government think twice about approving such grants...
...So much for Rudman's work for the Concord Coalition, a group that rails against federal deficits and runaway spending...
...A favorite Clinton method in funding the left has been to fund new initiatives like AmeriCorps, the so-called "volunteer" agency that has placed activists in various liberal organizations and the federal government...
...As well as anyone, these men understand that federal tax dolGrover G. Norquist is president of Americans for Tax Reform...
...John P. Walters of the New Citizenship Project calculates that the cost of a volunteer placed in a nonfederal agency comes to $26,037, and $31,592 per federal agency grantee...
Vol. 28 • September 1995 • No. 9
