Norquist wants Paul Ryan to be like Dick Cheney. Norquist: Ryan may play Cheney role

Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist says that although he didn’t want Paul Ryan to be the GOP vice presidential nominee at first, he is now pleased with the pick and predicts that he will do for domestic policy what Dick Cheney did for national security.

Norquist made the comments in an interview with Bloomberg TV set to air Friday night, in which he was asked if Ryan’s economic experience would make him a domestic policy equivalent to Cheney’s major national security role as vice president under George W. Bush.


“Absent Gitmo, yes,” Norquist replied. “I think that he would certainly have a large footprint. I was actually publicly an advocate of not having Ryan be the vice presidential nominee, not because I don’t think Ryan’s key or important, but because I think he’s so key and important.”

He later clarified: “I wanted him to stay in the House and run the Romney-Ryan plan through the House and the Senate, because I thought that was so important.”

Norquist told Bloomberg TV that Ryan’s budget plan has the advantage of having “been scored by CBO,” “written down” and vetted by the Republican in Congress, but that he expects Romney to embrace Ryan’s plan “with rough edges taken off and changes here and there.”

Norquist, the author of the anti-tax pledge signed by many GOP congressmen, also took aim at Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), saying he asked the senator “what were you thinking?” by pushing for an increase in revenue as a method for tackling the deficit.

“And he has this imaginary unicorn that he hopes to reach, and that is the Democrats giving him trillions of dollars of — in a lockbox — trillions of dollars of entitlement reforms, less spending, in which case he’d trade a teeny tax increase for that. I suggested that does not exist in the real world. It is like unicorn in that. And he said you may be right,” Norquist said. “So if he wants to go out and look for unicorns, he can have that conversation. But he’s going to be lonely out there, because there are no Democrats and no Republicans in that zone.”

Norquist also predicted that Romney will be elected with a Republican House and Senate and have an easier time pushing his agenda than he had as governor of Massachusetts, where a Democratic Legislature forced him to work as a “goalie” in which “the best you can do is stop shots.”