Here’s how bad things are among House Republicans: After the collapse of the coup attempt against Newt Gingrich, the speaker is being described as ” utterly contemptuous” of his fellow GOP leaders Dick Armey, Tom DeLay, and John Boehner. Having forced Bill Paxon’s resignation, Gingrich is eager for DeLay to step aside as well. Meanwhile, Armey and DeLay are said to have suffered an irreparable breach. The two Texans, close friends during their 12 years in the House, didn’t speak or make eye contact at a lunch held by the Texas GOP delegation in the Capitol on July 17. DeLay feels he was hung out to dry by Armey — who denies any involvement in the coup attempt he was very much a part of — and tensions are exacerbated by Armey’s frantic effort to get back into Gingrich’s good graces. No one seems to trust the cagey Boehner.
As the fights rage, rank-and-file House Republicans also have lost faith in their leaders. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Not long into Gingrich’s tenure as speaker, the conservatives who dominate House Republican ranks realized he wasn’t the ideological ally they thought he was. They complained he was too solicitous of GOP moderates, too reluctant to address hot-button issues like racial preference programs, and, in negotiations with congressional Democrats and the White House, too ready to compromise without getting much in return. What reassured the conservatives was that they had ideological soulmates in the leadership slots just below Gingrich. While the speaker might say one thing and do another, the conservatives believed they could trust Armey, DeLay, Boehner, and Paxon to play straight and fight for their issues.
The key development last week, if you listen to House conservatives, was that most of these leaders were exposed as conniving, weak, inept, and dishonest. The effort to remove Gingrich as speaker was aborted, and when its details were revealed in the press, the leadership waged a sloppy — and highly misleading — campaign to persuade House Republicans the effort hadn’t been what it seemed. The new distrust has almost nothing to do with the fact of an attempted coup — which many members would have welcomed — and everything to do with the leadership’s botching of the coup and subsequent fudging about what had transpired.
The backdrop is as follows: Armey, DeLay, Boehner, and Paxon had been meeting over the past few months in hopes of fixing the problems plaguing House Republicans. Less senior House Republicans, disgruntled by the GOP’s exceedingly modest agenda, were also holding similar meetings. This second group comprised many of the usual Gingrich critics — second-term conservatives like Joe Scarborough, Steve Largent, and Tom Coburn — but also moderates like Tom Campbell and past Gingrich supporters like Sue Myrick.
These meetings assumed greater importance after Gingrich bungled the disaster-relief bill in June. No immediate shakeup was expected, but on Thursday, July 10, DeLay approached one of the GOP rebels, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and said he and other members of the leadership hoped to introduce a resolution to remove Gingrich as speaker. DeLay wanted to know whether the rebels would support this move. A meeting was held that evening in Graham’s office, where the rebels gave DeLay their support. DeLay assured them approval of Gingrich’s ouster was unanimous within the leadership. Tom Campbell, a former professor at Stanford law school, was assigned to draw up the resolution to remove Gingrich, which DeLay said was needed quickly because a reporter had the story about a developing coup and would publish it the next day.
But no story appeared in the Friday papers, and at some point after the meetings broke up Thursday and before members reported to work Friday morning, the leadership retreated. The most popular (and plausible) version of the story circulating on Capitol Hill is that when Armey, who occupies the number two position in the House, was told by Boehner he would face a challenge if he sought to become speaker — and that he would probably lose — Armey removed himself from the coup effort. At this point, sources say, Armey’s allegiance switched from the plotters to Gingrich, whom he alerted to the machinations. This did nothing to ingratiate Armey to the rebels, and he further infuriated them Friday morning when he derided efforts to dump the speaker as “immoral.”
Leadership staffers take issue with parts of this story. They claim there was never any effort to get rid of Gingrich. The rebels, some say, misunderstood the purpose of the meetings. But even in the (unlikely) event that the leadership’s version is more accurate, it doesn’t matter at this point. Within a day of the coup attempt’s being reported, House members of all ideological stripes had concluded that the first account of leadership betrayal — detailed by Sandy Hume in the Hill, a Capitol Hill weekly — was correct.
Another conclusion quickly reached was that Armey was the one who had hurt his reputation most. When the story broke on July 16, his communications director, Michele Davis, arrived at a gathering of House Republicans — meeting to select someone to fill the leadership position held by the departing Susan Molinari — and distributed a statement in which Armey asserted, “Any and all allegations that I was involved in some ridiculous plot to oust the Speaker are completely false, and, in fact, ludicrous.”
This didn’t sit well with those who had been part of the effort to remove Gingrich and who believed Armey’s statement to be false. Near the end of the meeting, Jim Walsh, a New York moderate, rose and asked the leadership either to apologize to the speaker for having tried to oust him or to specify the inaccuracies in the Hill’s account. After initially declining to comment on the story, Armey said it was inaccurate. At this, Lindsey Graham exploded. The usually mild-mannered second-termer, who only recently emerged as a Gingrich critic, leaped out of his chair. He intended to go to the microphone and blast Armey for spreading lies. But before he could go anywhere he was restrained by another member sitting nearby, Richard Pombo, and Boehner quelled the eruption — Graham had knocked over his chair with a noisy clang – – by announcing he had the final tally in the election to replace Molinari.
Graham kept quiet about Armey for the rest of the week, though other House conservatives weren’t so restrained. “I’d be surprised if Armey kept his position as majority leader,” said one, adding that in his view Armey had become “a comical figure.” Another House Republican said Armey, who had been seen as one of the few people who could stand up to Gingrich, was now revealed to be as weak as the rest of the speaker’s inner circle. Others said Armey’s conduct his beginning as the coup’s ringleader, then retreating from it, then telling Gingrich about their colleagues’ plotting, then denying any involvement indicated he could no longer be trusted. No member I spoke with, moderate or conservative, believed Armey’s denials.
DeLay and Boehner minimized the damage to themselves by refusing to mount an Armey-style campaign to refute the coup story. Yet they too took hits from their colleagues last week. The main criticism of DeLay was that he was the chief instigator of the coup effort, having approached Lindsey Graham on the House floor about proceeding with the ouster and then hosted a meeting of the rebels in his whip’s office. Moreover, no one has determined exactly what the news report was that DeLay cited when demanding action from the rebels, leading some to speculate that it may have been a ruse to force members into action.
Boehner was accused of waging a stealth campaign of revision to cover up his tracks. One House member noted that Boehner had been seen spending time with an Associated Press reporter just prior to an AP story favorable to Boehner and the rest of the leadership. Indeed, the day the coup story appeared in the Hill, leadership aides were telling every reporter in earshot to read the AP story by David Espo, which they said was the “true” version of what had transpired.
Precisely what all of this means for Gingrich is unclear. The diminishing band of Gingrich loyalists — most of them moderates like Sherwood Boehlert of New York argue that he will be the stronger for surviving a coup. They also point out that securing Paxon’s “resignation” — Paxon was told to resign by Gingrich’s chief of staff, Arne Christenson was an indication the speaker won’t tolerate further insubordination. But the fact remains that the vast majority of House conservatives are disillusioned with Gingrich. “Newt may be stronger in the short term,” says Indiana conservative David McIntosh, “but nothing has happened to remove the underlying problems.”
Indeed, Gingrich is still Gingrich. He pledged to change his behavior after each previous burst of turmoil but always returned to his erratic and undisciplined ways. Further complicating his job is the disillusionment spreading now from the rank and file to his lieutenants in the leadership. This will make it increasingly difficult to manage the House’s unruly factions. Indeed, moderate distrust of Armey, DeLay, and Boehner is now heightened; Boehlert says he has “no reason to doubt” the coup story, which shows “a lapse in judgment” by those involved. There’s also the small problem for Gingrich of having to work with three people who plotted his downfall. All presumably recognize the only reason they retain their leadership positions is that they were elected by their colleagues unlike Paxon, who served at Gingrich’s request and therefore could be sacked.
Gingrich’s herculean challenge now is to keep a lid on the tensions seething within the House GOP, at least until the budget is completed. That’s easier said than done. House Republicans are more divided than at any point since the 1994 election. And Gingrich, who after repeated stumbles as speaker was already weak, has seen his position erode further. The joke from some second-term Republicans is that when they arrived in the House in 1995, they were inclined to trust the promises made by Gingrich and his leadership team. In 1996, their trust was tempered. Now it is gone, and they scrupulously verify promises the leadership makes. If any more promises are broken, House Republicans can turn to an obvious replacement: Paxon, the only member of the leadership who enjoys the confidence of both moderates and conservatives. The other possibility is that disgust over the leadership’s handling of the coup will move the GOP rank and file to bring all of them down.
Matthew Rees is a staff writer for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
