Norquist: Shut the Government Down if Necessary

House Republicans shouldn’t bend their principles on cutting government spending, says Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and a Newsmax contributor. If that ends in a shutdown of the government like in 1995, tough luck, he tells Politico.

Participants in this month’s elections “were voting to stop the Obama spendathon, and that’s what people were sent to Washington to do,” Norquist says.

“That’s what all the freshmen are going to do. That’s what the fight’s going to be about.” Republicans are poised for a conflict with President Barack Obama, he says. The president “will be less popular if — in the service of overspending and wasting people’s money — he closes the government down, as opposed to now, when he’s just wasting people’s money.”