HOUSE SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH is the Republicans’ newly self-appointed attack dog, excoriating President Clinton and congressional Democrats for crippling the investigations of White House abuses. Had Republican leaders been asked to pick an appropriate spokesman, they probably wouldn’t have picked Gingrich. But they weren’t asked. Nor were they asked to craft a new strategy of confronting Clinton and the Democrats. Gingrich, after months of hesitation, simply stepped forward April 27 with a full-throated attack. He didn’t tell House majority leader Dick Armey, whip Tom DeLay, or conference chairman John Boehner of his plans. Nonetheless, the effect was to install a tough new strategy of taking on the president and the Democrats — and not only on the campaign-finance and sex scandals. House Republicans are well on their way toward shredding Clinton’s entire policy agenda.
Republican leaders have an unusual working relationship. Gingrich, Armey, DeLay, and Boehner meet frequently, then go their separate ways. They are independent agents. For two months after the Monica Lewinsky story broke on January 21, all of them went along with Gingrich’s strategy of silence. The speaker insisted the press was playing up the scandals sufficiently without Republican help. But as Clinton fought back aggressively (without answering any questions) and his poll numbers rose, House Republicans grew restless. On March 19, DeLay broke ranks and implored the president “to come forward with the truth.” He informed Gingrich of his speech only an hour beforehand. Three weeks later, Armey visited a Texas school and accused Clinton of being ” shameless.” Now, Gingrich has joined in, insisting that Clinton and the Democrats are responsible for “the most systematic, deliberate obstruction of justice, cover-up, and effort to avoid the truth we have ever seen in American history.”
So the strategy is set, and Gingrich says he won’t back down, even as Democrats and the media try to make him the issue. House Democratic leader Richard Gephardt, for instance, wrote Gingrich a hasty letter demanding he remove himself from any congressional inquiries into campaign abuses or scandals. “I think I can outlast that,” Gingrich told me. “I did with Jim Wright. You just have to stay calm.” Gingrich, of course, stuck with his crusade against then-speaker Wright for years, eventually forcing Wright to resign. “What I’m doing is very cautious,” Gingrich says. His criticism stresses two points: The public has a right to know how presidential wrongdoing, and the president is not above the law.
The turning point for Gingrich was the refusal of Democrats on the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee to approve immunity on April 23 for four low-level witnesses in the campaign-finance probe. The Justice Department had okayed the immunity, but Rep. Henry Waxman said Democrats wouldn’t approve it — for the four or any other witnesses — out of disgust with chairman Dan Burton. Gingrich stewed about this for days, noting to aides that one of the potential witnesses worked for the largest Chinese cigarette company. Waxman, he said, was hypocritical in subpoenaing American tobacco company heads to appear before the committee, but letting the Chinese tobacco executive off the hook. To punctuate the point, Gingrich displayed a pack of Red Pagoda Mountain cigarettes at leadership meetings. More broadly, he concluded, Democrats were active participants in a White House-led cover- up.
Gingrich also fumed over Clinton’s assertion of a privilege for Secret Service agents to keep them from testifying in independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s Whitewater investigation. The privilege claim was frivolous, he thought. Agents don’t operate on the “Roman-emperor model of a Praetorian Guard,” he says. “The Secret Service doesn’t serve the president.
It serves the American people by protecting the president.” Also, Gingrich was infuriated by a New York Times story revealing Clinton’s role in facilitating an arms sale to China by a major Democratic donor. “That dramatically raised the stakes,” he says.
What are the stakes? Gingrich threatened to block any Clinton legislative requests until the White House and Democrats cooperate with the investigations. That’s mostly an idle threat, since republicans will oppose most of what Clinton wants anyway. But Gingrich has a very specific demand to be met before the House considers an $ 18 billion replenishment of the International Monetary Fund. The president must provide all documents touching on the relationship between the Riady family in Indonesia and the Clinton administration, plus make available all witnesses who might have information on the subject. The House will approve the money, Gingrich said, ” only in the context of knowing” how much the Riadys, longtime friends of Clinton, might benefit from the continuing IMF bailout of Indonesia. The Riadys have done favors for Clinton, including a $ 100,000 payment to Webster Hubbell, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s former law partner and later a top Justice Department official, after he was convicted of stealing from the Rose Law Firm.
Gingrich’s willingness to hold up the IMF funding represents a switch. When IMF funding was first discussed months ago by GOP leaders, he was for appropriating the $ 18 billion. DeLay was flatly opposed. Armey’s position was that, at the least, an anti-abortion provision should be added. Now, Gingrich has created a condition that makes funding highly unlikely. Meanwhile, Republicans are ready to block payment of past United Nations dues, pare down anti-tobacco legislation, pass a budget with larger than expected spending and tax cuts, and pepper Clinton with popular, conservative education proposals he’s likely to veto. Armey met privately with Clinton in March in hopes of persuading him to sign a school-choice bill for Washington, D.C. Clinton said he wouldn’t, but Armey went ahead and pushed the bill through the House on April 30.
For sure, there’s a big political component in Gingrich’s newfound combativeness. Boehner says there’s a “new political landscape,” in which Clinton is far weaker than previously believed. Gingrich, Boehner suggests, was merely the last to recognize that “we need to get on offense.” Rep. David McIntosh says republican leaders had trouble explaining how the be-nice-to- Clinton strategy was going to help the GOP win seats in the November midterm election. “If we are going to have a chance in the fall,” McIntosh says, Republicans must drive down Clinton’s poll numbers. Gingrich’s attack on the president shows that, finally, the speaker agrees.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
