Politics & Power Quote by Grover Norquist

Norquist goes for the jugular by laundering a party tactic through the name of a mass murderer. Calling it "known quaintly" is the tell: the faux-offhand tone dares you to laugh, then implicates you in the cruelty of the analogy. It is shock politics as branding, engineered to make ordinary coalition-building sound like predation.

The target is a familiar Democratic method: split the opposition, peel off moderates, negotiate with some interests while isolating others. In legislative terms, thats vote-whipping, horse-trading, and sequencing. Norquist reframes it as something darker: not persuasion but elimination. The line "take them out of the room one at a time" turns incremental policy wins into a crime-scene narrative, where compromise becomes coercion and bipartisanship becomes a trap.

Context matters. Norquist is an architect of Republican anti-tax orthodoxy and a strategist of partisan discipline; he understands that politics is often about narrowing the battlefield. By accusing Clinton and Obama of doing it, he simultaneously warns Republicans not to defect and gives conservative media a sticky metaphor to repeat. Its less argument than inoculation: if a Republican collaborates, theyre not governing, theyre being "taken out."

The deeper subtext is moral inversion. Democrats arent wrong because their policies fail; theyre wrong because their process is framed as inherently sinister. Its a way to turn procedural savvy into character indictment, and to make obstruction sound like self-defense.