Posted in the Washington Post, October 23, 2012
Written by Mike DuBonis

In what appears to be a first for the tax-and-spendy world of District politics, a local candidate has signed the vaunted Taxpayer Protection Pledge .

Bruce Majors, the Libertarian candidate for congressional delegate , took Americans for Tax Reform’s pledge earlier this month. And Grover Norquist, ATR’s president, said that, to his knowledge, Majors is the first District candidate to take it.

No-new-tax pledges are not unheard of in D.C. politics; Adrian M. Fenty promised not to raise taxes when running for mayor. (After getting elected, Fenty raised scads of fees in his mayoral budget proposals but left it to the D.C. Council to raise income, sales and property taxes to balance a recession-battered budget.) But Majors, a Dupont Circle realtor, is unusual in making his promise to taxpayers via ATR and Norquist.

The pledge, of course, is rather popular on the national level, with 238 representatives and 41 senators currently signed on — all but three of them Republicans. Norquist and his pledge are a liberal and moderate bête noire, regularly blamed these days for partisan gridlock and the inability of Congress to come to a “grand bargain” to balance the budget and pay down the national debt. ATR mostly focuses on Congress but has occasionally editorialized against the city’s tax policies, which include a decision to hike income taxes on wealthy residents last year.

The rest of the article can be found here .