Who Said "Drown it in a bathtub"

[ThomWV]

I've got the name William Norquest or something like that in my mind for a fellow who is reported to have said he would like to shrink the size of the Federal Government down to where you could put it in a bathtub and drown it. Can anyone tell me the correct name and spelling for that fellow? It would be appreciated.

Thom

[NicoleM]

1. Grover Norquist.

[Jackpine Radical]

2. Grover Norquist.

.

[MrBenchley]

3. Grover Norquist

He's an NRA board member with actual ties to Muslim fundamentalist terrorist groups...

[baldguy]

4. Google "drown it in a bathtub"

Interesting

[jmowreader]

5. Grover Norquist is an anti-tax crusader

I always want to ask the anti-tax, no-government crusaders this:

The following items are functions of the government:

Supply of clean water
Operation of the sanitary sewer system
Maintenance of the public highways
Removal of road-killed animals
Enforcement of public laws
Safety inspection of new construction
Fire protection
Defense of the nation
Flood control
Air traffic control

Of these ten items, which one would you like to have terminated? (Do not bring privatization into the argument; no private firm will endeavor to collect dead animals or extinguish house fires, and private armies have already been tried--which is why we have public armies.)

The "ummm...." will be revealing.

[prolesunited]

6. He's a big player. You should become more familiar with him.

Here's an excellent article in The Nation that profiles Norquist and outlines his philosophy and strong ties to the Bushes.

To Norquist, who loves being called a revolutionary, hardly an agency of government is not worth abolishing, from the Internal Revenue Service and the Food and Drug Administration to the Education Department and the National Endowment for the Arts. "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years," he says, "to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."
<snip>

Norquist predicts that in the end Bush will win a tax cut that comes pretty close to his original plan of at least $1.6 trillion. If support wavers, he says, a compromise of sorts might be struck, in which the most controversial part of the package--the rate reduction from 39.6 percent to 33 percent for the highest earners--would be scaled back or eliminated, to be replaced by a cut in the capital gains tax. (Repeal of the estate tax is almost certain not to pass this year.) Then, he says, next year Bush will come back for more. Many of the tax breaks for special interests, including the timber industry, the liquor interests and software companies like Microsoft, he suggests, could be assembled together in a package labeled "international competitiveness." Says Norquist matter-of-factly, "We'll take that pig and put lipstick on it.
<snip>

Asked to name one that might emerge as his next battleground, he pauses. Well, he says, there's the matter of all those state and local pension plans. State by state, he's planning to launch a campaign to dismantle and privatize state pension plans and their trillions of dollars of public funds held as investments for retirees. "Just 115 people control $1 trillion in these funds," he says. "We want to take that power and destroy it."
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml%3Fi=20010514&s=dreyfuss