BRIEFLY LAST WEEK, House Speaker Newt Gingrich appeared on the verge of toppling, pushed by a small band of House Republicans and outside allies. Columnist Kate O’Beirne launched the first strike. Writing in National Review after the election, she called on Gingrich, beset by ethics troubles, to abdicate temporarily in favor of the septuagenarian chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Henry Hyde. GOP Rep. Steve Largent and conservative guru Paul Weyrich echoed O’Beirne’s call for Gingrich to bow out, while Rep. Marge Roukema, a New Jersey moderate, announced, “I can think of no one better than Henry Hyde as speaker.” Fellow moderate and Gingrich ally Chris Shays declared he would abstain from voting to make Gingrich speaker in January unless a long-awaited ethics report were released by then, while Rep. Pete King, a Long Island Republican, upped the ante, blasting Gingrich as “damaged goods” and “a handicap to the Republican party.”
Top Republicans tended to disregard these statements as the work of publicity hounds (“As Pete King goes, so does not go the Republican conference,” sniffs his conservative colleague, Mark Souder of Indiana), and it now appears Gingrich will face no challenge when House Republicans nominate their leaders on November 20. But Gingrich, his staff, and his allies were far from indifferent to the numerous brush fires and moved swiftly to stamp them out.
The most striking evidence of concern came on November 12, when 15 members of the House Republican leadership released a six-paragraph statement in support of Gingrich featuring the proclamation: “We unequivocally support Newt’s re-election as Speaker for the 105th Congress.” The statement, put together by Gingrich booster Rep. Bill Paxon, helped stifle the rumblings of mutiny. And the effort to bolster the speaker’s position didn’t end there. A senior Gingrich staffer called O’Beirne to express disappointment with her column and also sought to get King to pipe down. (He didn’t. On both Crossfire and Equal Time on November 13, he again said that Gingrich should temporarily step aside.) Gingrich’s appointee as head of the House Republican campaign committee, John Linder of Georgia, took time out from his new job to thunder against the renegades; “I think the membership ought to keep their mouths shut,” he said. Gingrich himself spoke with Largent and claimed he received an apology, though Largent stayed mum. Gingrich and Shays spoke, but there are no hard feelings: Shays attended a November 11 dinner sponsored by GOPAC where Gingrich was a featured speaker, and they had a friendly chat the next day in the House gym.
Why all the fuss? House GOP sources say the real concern was never that Gingrich would face a serious challenge when Republicans gathered to nominate their new speaker. Instead, there was a wish to prevent any premature blood- letting before the potentially more troubling event: the release of the ethics committee report.
Anyone who’s heard Gingrich speak in recent months knows that Democrats have filed 75 ethics complaints against him and that all but one have been dismissed. That remaining one is Gingrich’s albatross. The alleged infraction is highly technical — Did Gingrich improperly use tax-deductible charitable donations to finance a partisan college course he taught? — but it prompted the appointment of a special counsel, James Cole, late last year.
When Cole filed a preliminary report with the ethics committee in mid- August, it immediately became the subject of partisan wrangling. Democrats demanded it be made public, while Republicans sought to block its release, claiming it was only a “draft discussion document” and contained no analysis, recommendations, or findings. (Largent and King were among those defending Gingrich on the House floor.) Democrats succeeded in forcing a September 19 vote on releasing the report but were easily defeated. That was thought to put Gingrich’s ethics problems off the table until after the election, but seven days later a bipartisan ethics subcommittee voted unanimously to expand the inquiry. It instructed Cole to determine whether the speaker had provided “accurate, reliable, and complete information” to investigators. Bluntly, Did Gingrich lie or otherwise obstruct justice?
The GOP’s nightmare scenario is for Gingrich to be installed as speaker and then have the ethics committee charge him with highly technical infractions that Republicans can’t easily explain but that Democrats can exploit. One House Republican says this is a realistic fear and points out that if the preliminary ethics report had exonerated Gingrich, it probably would have been released before the election. Souder, an occasional critic of Gingrich’s who supports his reelection, says, “We at least need some preliminary report before we vote in January.” Some sort of report is expected in the next month, though no one can be sure because the five Republicans and five Democrats on the ethics committee are bound to secrecy.
Yet the willingness of some Republicans and conservative commentators to speak out against Gingrich — combined with the GOP’s loss of House seats in the recent election — underscores the speaker’s weakened position. Recognizing his vulnerability, Gingrich intends to adopt a lower profile. Thus, after a November 12 meeting with President Clinton, he deferred to his fellow Republican leaders Trent Lott and Dick Armey, preached common ground, and counseled that any investigations of the president should proceed “very carefully and very systematically and without breaking up the sense of bipartisanship.” This kinder, gentler approach could prompt Gingrich’s House adversaries, ranging from David Bonior to Pete King, to go a little easier on him in the months ahead. Could, but probably won’t.
by Matthew Rees
