PERHAPS the first sign that something was awry was the row over ethanol. Both men involved are committed fiscal conservatives, with a profound dislike of taxes. Neither wanted to be seen as favouring either tax increases or corporate boondoggles. Yet that is exactly what they accused one another of last year. Tom Coburn, a senator from Oklahoma and a scourge of government waste, had put forward a measure to eliminate an expensive tax credit for ethanol. Grover Norquist, America’s most prominent anti-tax activist, argued that removing the credit without passing an offsetting tax cut amounted to a tax increase. The row ended with Mr Coburn calling Mr Norquist “stupid”.

Republicans who want to keep their jobs do not, as a rule, call Mr Norquist that. Since 1986 he has been asking candidates for public office to sign his Taxpayer Protection Pledge, in which they abjure tax increases of any sort for ever. Those who demur are pilloried as tax-loving expropriators, both by Mr Norquist’s outfit, Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), and by their political rivals, especially in Republican primaries. Hatred of taxes (or fear of such attacks) is so widespread that 238 of the current members of the House of Representatives and 41 of the senators—all but three of them Republicans—have taken the pledge. That constitutes a majority in the House, and enough senators to mount a filibuster.

All of which has earned Mr Norquist a reputation as a sort of congressional puppet-master, controlling the goings-on in Washington without ever having to submit himself to voters. Arianna Huffington, a liberal publisher, describes him, to his evident delight, as “the dark wizard of the right’s anti-tax cult”. Harry Reid, the leader of the Democratic majority in the Senate, regularly blames him for the gridlock that afflicts the chamber. Republicans tend to be as obsequious as Democrats are hostile. The guest-lists for Mr Norquist’s weekly meetings are a Who’s Who of conservatism. Newt Gingrich, a former speaker of the House, once declared him “the most innovative, creative, courageous and entrepreneurial leader…of conservative grassroots activism in America”. Mitch McConnell, leader of the Republicans in the Senate, said last year that it was thanks to “soldiers like Grover that the conservative movement is so vibrant today”.

The spell Mr Norquist has cast over the Republican Party has weakened of late. “Who the hell is Grover Norquist anyway?” asked George Bush senior in July. The former president might be dismissed as a relic of the past, still bitter about the lashing he received from the right after breaking his 1988 campaign promise not to raise taxes. Yet Mr Coburn is not the only sitting member of Congress to express similar views. Frank Wolf, a representative from Virginia, suggests that Mr Norquist is defending tax breaks out of deference to unnamed corporate bankrollers. “Have we really reached the point where one person’s demand for ideological purity is paralysing Congress?” he asked last year. Saxby Chambliss, a senator from Georgia involved in bipartisan talks on deficit reduction, declared last year that “Grover Norquist has no credibility.”

The vast bulk of Republicans in the incoming Congress will still be signatories of the pledge. But dissent is growing: the number of hold-outs in the House has grown from six to 16. On top of those, a handful of Republican congressmen have publicly renounced the pledge, meaning that from next year Mr Norquist will have lost his majority. And many others have suggested that they would be willing to entertain a “grand bargain”, which raised revenue by eliminating tax credits and deductions, as long as Democrats agreed to cost-cutting reforms to Medicare and Social Security. Some 41 Republicans in the House and Senate signed a letter along those lines last year. Since the election, both Mr McConnell and John Boehner, the speaker of the House, have made similar noises, just as they begin negotiations with the newly re-elected president on America’s fiscal shambles.

Still writing the rules

The dark wizard himself, with admirable sangfroid, insists that little has changed and that, when push comes to shove, Republicans will stick to the pledge. Democrats are not serious about entitlement reform, he argues. Those Republicans offering tax increases in exchange are saying nothing more meaningful than “If there were unicorns, I’d like a pink one.” In the end, Mr Norquist predicts, the president will blink and drop his demand that tax rates on the rich must rise, just as he did during a similar stand-off two years ago.

That sounds like bluster. It is true that most Republicans in the House have more to fear from a primary than the general election. Even if the Republican leadership embraces a revenue-raising deal, its unruly footsoldiers may scupper it. But that is far from certain, and would still leave Mr Norquist a long way from his stated goal of shrinking the federal government until it is small enough to drown in a bathtub. Despite his prediction of a Republican sweep in the elections, Barack Obama remains in office, and the Democrats actually picked up seats in both the House and Senate. And it is hard to see how headlines like “Grover Norquist the Has-Been” and “Is it Over for Grover?” help his cause.

By any standard other than the absurdly high one he has set himself, though, Mr Norquist continues to dominate Washington’s tax debate. Almost all revenue-raising proposals hinge on eliminating deductions, rather than raising marginal rates. If Mr Obama does succeed in raising the income-tax rate for the richest, it will have taken him two elections and all manner of fiscal face-offs and crises to get his way—and success is still far from assured. Even scrapping an economically nonsensical subsidy for ethanol, it seems, is still a highly controversial move. Grover is not over yet.