For years, Grover Norquist has been one of the right’s strictest disciplinarians on matters of taxes and spending. So naturally, with Congress on the verge of forcing Internet retailers to collect billions in state sales taxes, Norquist is denouncing the move as an assault on freedom. “Do you really believe there is a limit to the amount of abuse an Alabama tax collector can hurl on a New York or California or Maine business?” he recently said on Fox Business. “There are tremendous abuses that would flow from politicians taxing businesses that can’t even vote against them.” He has dubbed the bill the “Let People in Alabama Loot People in New York Act.”

And yet, when it comes to ensuring that Republicans in Congress actually defeat this license to loot, Norquist has been surprisingly Zen. His group, Americans for Tax Reform, refuses to say whether a vote for the so-called Marketplace Fairness Act would constitute a violation of the no-new taxes pledge it has persuaded almost every congressional Republican to sign. Last week, an ATR apparatchik said that no pledge-signer could support the bill in good conscience, but pointedly avoided vowing punishment for those who did.

There are two plausible interpretations of this delicate parsing. The first is that Norquist is doing everything in his power to defeat the bill, but is simply hamstrung by the wording of his famous pledge, which doesn’t explicitly preclude it. The second is that Norquist trying to have it both ways—positioning himself to claim credit for the bill’s defeat, but to insist the pledge tied his hands if it passes. At the risk of being overly cynical, I strongly suspect it’s the latter.

Pundits and wishful-thinking Democrats have been predicting Norquist’s obsolescence for the better part of a decade. But the idea of Norquist losing influence misses the point. Norquist has never been powerful, at least not in the sense of commanding divisions or cracking heads on close votes. His talent has always been for creating the illusion of influence. For the 25 years in which anti-tax orthodoxy has reigned supreme in the Republican ranks, Norquist has distinguished himself mainly through his savvy at associating himself with the trend. Not surprisingly, now that some in the GOP periodically question the party’s anti-tax catechism (though they stop well short of abandoning it), Norquist’s chief preoccupation isn’t defending the faith. It’s protecting his image as a leader of the faithful.

In Norquist’s telling, the pledge was revolutionary because it eliminated the “weasel words” from politicians’ promises. Previously, politicians could vow to oppose tax increases, but voters had no reason to believe them. The pols could always wriggle out by claiming circumstances had changed. Post-pledge, on the other hand, there was no ambiguity. Voters could trust anyone who’d signed because the language was clear and categorical. “[It] tells you an awful lot of what you want to know about an elected official if they make that commitment in writing because they can't take it back,” Norquist has said.