The bedhopping Newt believes that marriage is between one man and
THREE women! -T
Newt Gingrich in Duluth, Georgia, Thursday, October, 28, 2010. (AP
Photo/David Goldman)
How much Americans hate Congress has become cliché. Congress's
approval rating is at an all-time low, and it's not hard to see why:
the institution is broken. Plenty of structural forces have
contributed to Congress's dysfunction: the increasing flow of money in
politics, the emergence of the 24/7 cable news cycle, the increasing
polarization of the electorate. But perhaps no single person bears as
much responsibility as Newt Gingrich.
About the Author
Alex Seitz-Wald
Alex Seitz-Wald is the Assistant Editor of ThinkProgress.org, a
project of the Center for American Progress Action...
Related Topics
Human Interest Newt Gingrich Political Endorsement Political
Relationship Social Issues Technology War "I spent 16 years building a
majority in the House for the first time since 1954," Gingrich said
during NBC's Florida GOP debate Monday night, referring to the
Republican takeover of the House in 1994. Over those sixteen years of
personal and partisan striving, Gingrich invented or perfected many of
the things that Americans dislike most about Congress. "I think I am a
transformational figure," Gingrich said before the 1994 election. "I
am trying to effect a change so large that the people who would be
hurt by the change, the liberal Democratic machine" will fight it,
Gingrich explained.
There is no greater pathology in today's Congress than obstructionism,
from Speaker John Boehner's (R-OH) refusal to raise the debt ceiling
in July to Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) taking disaster relief
funds for Hurricane Irene hostage. Both parties have long used
Congress's procedural rules to promote legislation they favor, but
Gingrich created something new. "There is the assumption—pioneered by
Newt Gingrich himself, as early as the 1970s—that the minority wins
when Congress accomplishes less," Representative Steny Hoyer (D-MD),
the number-two Democrat in the House, explained in a 2009 speech at
the Center for American Progress Action Fund. "Gingrich's proposition,
and maybe accurately, was that as long as…our party cooperate[s] with
Democrats and get[s] 20 or 30 percent of what we want and they get to
say they solved the problem and had a bipartisan bill, there's no
incentive for the American people to change leadership," Hoyer told
the Washington Post after the speech. "To some degree, he was proven
right in 1994."
In many ways, the obstructionist minority that Hoyer faced two years
ago was following a playbook written by Gingrich over a decade
earlier. Gingrich, in fact, took the debt ceiling hostage fifteen
years before Boehner did, demanding huge, partisan cuts. In that case,
the GOP backed down after President Clinton vetoed their spending
bills and Moody's warned of a credit downgrade. When Boehner refused
to raise the debt ceiling, the threat of default lowered the US's
credit rating and was resolved by an complicated process involving a
"supercommittee" and a two-step raising of the debt limit over a year.
And it was Gingrich who, in one of his first acts as Speaker, patented
the practice of refusing to approve disaster relief funds if they
weren't offset with spending cuts. Gingrich even held out after the
Oklahoma City bombing later that year, prompting the Philadelphia
Daily News to write, "Even Newt Gingrich must lose a little sleep at
the idea of making political hay out of the mini-civil war that struck
Oklahoma City."
Of course, Gingrich's greatest act of obstructionist brinkmanship was
the 1995 and 1996 government shutdowns. Thanks to his refusal to
concede on spending on social services, the government closed for five
days in 1995, longer than the previous eight government shutdowns, and
for a whopping twenty-one days a year later—the longest shutdown in
history. Thanks to Gingrich's obstinacy, health and welfare services
for veterans were curtailed, Social Security checks were delayed, tens
of thousands of visa applications went unprocessed and "numerous
sectors of the economy" we negatively impacted, according to the
Congressional Research Service.
Then there's perhaps the most universally reviled practice of
Congress: earmarking. Spending on earmarks doubled during Gingrich's
reign as Speaker, rising from $7.8 billion in 1994 to $14.5 billion in
1997. "Speaker Gingrich set in motion the largest explosion of
earmarks in the history of Congress," said Tom Schatz of the
conservative group Citizens Against Government Waste. The pork binge
was part of a Machiavellian plot to use taxpayer dollars to help
Republicans get reelected, as Gingrich himself laid out in a 1996
policy memo titled, "Proposed Principles for Analyzing Each
Appropriations Bill." The memo instructed the chairmen of House
Appropriation subcommittees to ask themselves if there are "any
Republican members" who "need a specific district item in the bill."
This apparently included Gingrich himself, as Cobb County, Georgia,
which the Speaker represented, received more federal dollars per
resident than any other suburban county in the country in 1995, except
for Arlington, Virginia, home of the Pentagon and other federal
agencies, and Brevard County, Florida, home to Cape Canaveral and the
Kennedy Space Center.
This partisan earmarking has led Representative Jeff Flake (R-AZ), a
longtime anti-earmark crusader who has endorsed Mitt Romney, to dub
Gingrich "the father of contemporary earmarking. " Senator John McCain
(R-AZ) went even further on a Romney campaign conference call
Wednesday, saying that Gingrich's plan to "distribute these earmarks
led directly to the Abramoff scandal, Congressman Bob Ney going to
jail and the corruption that I saw with my own eyes."
Meanwhile, Gingrich was busy creating the climate of nearly nihilistic
partisanship that reigns today. In May of 1988, against the wishes of
the more moderate GOP leadership, Gingrich brought ethics charges
against then-Democratic Speaker Jim Wright relating to a book deal.
"This was very much Newt's initiative," John Pitney, a professor at
Claremont McKenna College who has studied Gingrich for years, told The
Nation. Gingrich successfully forced Wright to resign "and that
really, for the first time, kind of politicized the entire ethics
process," Larry Evans, a government professor at the College of
William and Mary in Virginia, told NPR in December. Ten years later,
Gingrich was brought down by a similarly politically charged ethics
process, when he was fined $300,000 for flouting tax laws with a
tax-exempt college class that Democrats charged was actually political
propaganda.
Before Wright, Gingrich tussled with another Democratic speaker and
made a name for himself by exploiting the media and the new medium of
C-SPAN. Gingrich was sworn in to his first term just a few months
before C-SPAN went on the air in 1979, and as an ambitious freshman,
he quickly realized the network's potential. He and a small cadre of
young Republicans he led pilloried then-Democratic Speaker Tip O'Neill
and other Democratic lawmakers nightly with personal attacks, no
matter how unfair, like when he accused the Speaker of putting
"communist propaganda" in the Speaker's lobby.
O'Neill was so irritated by Gingrich's speeches that he once ordered
the House cameras to pan across the empty House chamber to expose that
Gingrich was speaking to no one but the cameras, and called Gingrich's
exploits "the lowest thing that I've ever seen in my 32 years in
Congress. Gingrich fired back that O'Neil was coming "all too close to
resembling a McCarthyism of the Left." The resulting the two-hour
exchange, which was covered on every broadcast news outlet that night,
made Gingrich into a national hero for conservatives and a villain to
liberals.
It was the "moment that made Gingrich," as Pitney wrote on his blog,
and set the mold of punching up in the media that ambitious upstart
firebrands like Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN) would follow
for years to come."If you're not in the Washington Post every day, you
might as well not exist," Gingrich told Newsweek in the late 80s.
With his newfound fame and a small army of fiery conservative
lawmakers behind him—the so-called Conservative Opportunity Society
Gingrich created formed in 1983—Gingrich set out to remake the GOP. He
narrowly won an election to be House minority whip in 1989 over a more
moderate Republican from Illinois and with this official position, he
ventured to "build a much more aggressive, activist party," as he put
it. He beefed up the party's fundraising and recruiting operations to
get more Republicans elected and hired pollster Frank Luntz to manage
the party's messaging. Five years later, Gingrich led a wave of
fifty-four new Republicans into the House and was elected Speaker.
Of course, Gingrich's greatest act of punching up would have to wait
until he was Speaker, when he exploited Congressional power to impeach
President Clinton for having an affair while he himself was having an
affair with his current wife Callista. When Univision correspondent
Jorge Ramos asked Gingrich about this hypocrisy Wednesday, Gingrich
replied, "No, I criticized President Clinton for lying under oath in
front of a federal judge, committing perjury—which is a felony for
which normal people go to jail." But as Clinton's overwhelming
popularity today attests, Gingrich's crusade lacked merit and was
plainly political. "Their efforts have succeeded only in turning a
serious constitutional process into a partisan process that demeaned
both the House and the Senate and became a painful ordeal for the
entire country," Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) said at the time.
Just as important, but often overlooked today, is the way in which
Gingrich centralized power in party leadership. Progressive Democrats,
frustrated with Southern conservative Democrats' controlling committee
chairmanships, started this trend in 1970s, Pitney said, but Gingrich
consolidated power in himself to an unprecedented degree by making it
so the Speaker could appoint key committee chairmanships. This allowed
him to tightly control the agenda and sideline dissident factions in
his party in a way that every Speaker since has exploited. "There was
a lot of heightened partisanship on both sides, but Gingrich was very
vivid, was very much a part of this process" of polarization, Pitney
told The Nation.
In another structural change that persists to this day, Gingrich
shortened the Congressional workweek to three days in order to
maximize fundraising opportunities and provide more contact with
constituents. But this also cut down on the amount of time lawmakers
spent together in Washington where they could make personal
connections across the aisle.
All together, Gingrich's emphasis on partisan warfare über alles sped
the demise of the comity that is essential to the functioning of
Congress. If the parties refuse to work together, little can be
achieved without super-majorities. It was Gingrich who made winning,
rather than good governance, the chief currency of success. Earlier
this month, James Lardner laid out in this magazine a proposal to roll
back much of Gingrich's work and fix Congress—but now Gingrich is
campaigning to takeover another branch of government. One can only
imagine the damage he might inflict there.
More:
http://www.thenation.com/article/165938/how-newt-gingrich-crippled-congress?rel=emailNation
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
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