The Newt normal

The dichotomy reflects the contrasting partisan roles of and perceptions of Gingrich going back to his first election to the House in 1978, representing a suburban Atlanta district. House Republicans at the time were buried deep in the minority amid Democrats’ four-decade majority run from 1955-95.

Gingrich, throughout the late Cold War era, convinced his GOP colleagues they could one day win a majority. Gingrich scored a leadership position in March 1989 as minority whip. And the 1994 “Republican Revolution” effectively handed the former college history professor the speaker’s gavel, putting him second in line for presidential succession behind only the vice president.

The huge 1994 Republican victory, picking up 54 House seats, was boosted in part by the “Contract with America,” a document signed Sept. 27 by members of the then-minority party. The contract outlined legislation to be considered by the House during the first 100 days if voters handed Republicans the majority. Proposals included tax cuts, a permanent line-item veto, and constitutional amendments requiring term limits and a balanced budget, among other measures.

Now, House Republicans are eyeing a similar strategy to claw out of the minority with their “Commitment to America.” Gingrich has consulted on the proposal with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who is likely to become speaker in a GOP House majority. The commitment, set for unveiling on Sept. 23, comprises four broad planks: the economy, safety, freedom, and government accountability.

Gingrich outlined his thoughts on these issues in a Sept. 12 Washington Examiner op-ed. House Republican campaign plans should include candidates distancing themselves from Democrats’ efforts to tie them to Trump, Gingrich wrote. They should focus on “the issues that matter in the lives of everyday people.” Most notably, candidates should focus on proposing solutions to rising crime rates and inflation, in Gingrich’s view.

House Democrats, on the other hand, couldn’t care less what Gingrich has to say about policy prescriptions. They want to know about his level of involvement in post-election shenanigans during the winter of 2020-21 to keep Trump in the White House despite a clear 306-232 Electoral College loss to Biden.

The Democratic-led House Jan. 6 committee has invited Gingrich to testify. Gingrich was “involved in various other aspects of the scheme to overturn the 2020 election and block the transfer of power, including after the violence of January 6th,” according to a committee news release, citing the Capitol riots by Trump supporters two weeks before Biden’s inauguration.

The committee’s chairman, Mississippi Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson, wrote in a Sept. 1 letter sent to Gingrich that the panel has obtained emails the former speaker exchanged with Trump’s associates. The emails concern television advertisements which, according to Thompson, “repeated and relied upon false claims about fraud in the 2020 election” and were designed to cast doubt on the voting after it had already taken place.

Thompson wrote that Gingrich also appeared to be involved in Trump’s scheme to appoint fake electors and emailed Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, about those efforts on the evening of Jan. 6, after Trump supporters had attacked the Capitol.

Gingrich’s increasingly high Capitol Hill profile comes more than 20 years after House Republicans forced him out of Congress after a series of controversies in the late 1990s. Still, Gingrich has been in the public spotlight to varying degrees in the years since as a prolific author and filmmaker, unsuccessful 2012 Republican presidential candidate, and, most recently, diplomatic spouse near the Vatican. His wife, Callista, was U.S. ambassador to the Holy See for much of Trump’s White House term.

All the while, a cottage industry has emerged basically blaming the former speaker for the nation’s current political dysfunction. Gingrich is a central villain in recent books by Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank and Princeton University history professor Julian Zelizer. Gingrich is portrayed as practically a one-man wrecking crew on congressional civility and decorum during his 1979-99 House career in Milbank’s The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party and Zelizer’s Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party.

These works and similar ones focus on a 1990 Gingrich GOP candidate manual listing 65 insults and abusive phrases for Republicans to deploy against Democrats. Among them: “traitors,” “sick,” “corrupt,” “betray,” “bizarre,” “pathetic,” “abuse of power,” “anti-flag,” “anti-family,” and “anti-child.” To a group of College Republicans, Gingrich mused, “I think that one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty.”

These tactics were undoubtedly aggressive and hard-edged and pushed boundaries of civility. But they were also effective, helping weaken the House Democratic majority that had been in place for most of the previous half-century-plus, going back to the final year of Herbert Hoover’s presidency during the depth of the Great Depression in the early 1930s. Taking on the entrenched House Democratic majority frontally and directly was the only way to wrest control over decades of GOP subservience in the minority.

Gingrich, 79, still arouses strong feelings on Capitol Hill. House Republicans respect his political acumen 28 years after he acted as a political Moses, leading Republicans to the promised land of the majority after 40 years of wandering. House Democrats have never forgiven Gingrich for ending what to many lawmakers seemed a birthright of a perpetual majority. Both sides this fall will have plenty to praise and complain about with Gingrich making headlines on Capitol Hill.