How Newt Gingrich sowed the seeds of dysfunction that are today plaguing Congress
There is chaos in the House of Representatives. Speaker John Boehner announced recently that he would be resigning at the end of October. His second in command, Kevin McCarthy has been forced to bow out of the race because of backlash over comments he made over the nature of the Select Committee on Benghazi.
Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Paul Ryan, has been identified as the only person who can unite both the ultra-conservative and establishment wings of the Party. There is only one problem: Ryan doesn’t want the job and will only accept it if a list of conditions is met.
It is the Conservative Wing of the Party that is widely seen as having forced John Boehner to resign. His unwillingness to shut down the government over, among other things, the budget and President Obama’s executive orders on immigration, has infuriated conservatives. One Republican member went so far as to file a motion to vacate the chair earlier this year (which is, in effect, a motion to impeach the Speaker of the House).
The conservative wing doesn’t have enough members to deliver 218 votes (the number one needs to be elected Speaker) for a potential candidate, and the establishment wing could not get enough support among conservatives to get a member whom they support elected. (The conservative wing of the party only numbers about 40 members but that is enough to prevent someone whom they do not support from getting elected).
And therein lays the dilemma: establishment Republicans can’t get anyone elected without support from the conservative wing, and the conservative wing won’t support anyone who establishment Republicans can get elected.
How did we get here? How did we get to the point where the third most powerful position in our government is a job no one wants? How did we get to the point where the outgoing Speaker is so thrilled to be resigning, he couldn’t help but sing “zip-a-dee-doo-dah, what a wonderful day,” as he was approaching the podium? How did we get to the point where any Republican who can garner enough support from his colleagues to get elected Speaker is automatically seen as illegitimate by a significant portion of his caucus?
In 1978 a young congressman came to the House of Representatives from the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia. As a freshman he called for the expulsion of Representative Charles Diggs, who had been convicted of embezzlement. It was a gutsy move for a freshman to call for the expulsion of a veteran lawmaker. Especially one of some stature (Mr. Diggs was the founder of the Congressional Black Caucus). In 1983 he called for the expulsion of two congressmen who were found to be having inappropriate sexual relationships with teenagers working as congressional pages.
In the mid 1980s, he made a habit of taking to the House floor and berating his democratic opponents, calling them, among other things, communists and challenging to come to the podium and defend themselves. The diatribes were usually delivered at night when House business had concluded and most members had gone home.
In 1984 then House Speaker Tip O’Neal ordered the cameras to periodically pan the chamber so that most of America got to see the congressman was speaking to an empty chamber while pretending he was speaking to a packed one. O’Neal declared that it was the “lowest thing that I've ever seen in my 32 years in Congress."
In the late 1980’s the congressman led a crusade against Speaker of the House Jim Wright over a book deal whose sales seemed to be directed towards political supporters of Wright’s, as a way to circumvent campaign donation limits. It was during this time that the congressman began to view his fight with Democrats as a civil war that had to be, in his words, “fought with a scale and a duration and a savagery that is only true of civil wars…”
In the early 1990’s he helped to expose major scandals in the House like the House Banking Scandal and the Post Office Scandal. With the help of GOPAC, a political action committee, he pioneered the use of language as a mechanism for controlling and defining his political opponents. In 1996 GOPAC issued a memorandum with words and phrases for republican candidates to use against their Democratic opponents. They encouraged using phrases that would draw a contrast with their counterparts. Words to use about themselves included: “courage”, “duty”, “freedom”, “liberty”, “moral”, “peace”, “prosperity”, “success” and “truth.” Words to use about their opponents included: “bizarre”, “cheat”, “corruption”, “crisis”, “decay”, “destroy”, “failure”, “radical”, “sick”, “steal”, “they/them”, “threaten” and “traitors.”
Incredulousness of most colleagues aside, the congressman was able to achieve success with these tactics. In 1994 Republicans were able to win the majority in the House for the first time in 40 years. The congressman would go on to be elected Speaker of the House where he would continue most of these techniques, culminating with the effort to impeach President Bill Clinton for lying under oath about an affair with a 22-yearl-old White House intern.
The question isn’t whether the congressman, Newt Gingrich, achieved a level of success with these tactics, but rather, at what cost?
All politicians attempt to persuade with heated and fiery rhetoric. Most politicians will use incriminating information against an opponent if it will deliver them a political victory. But what made Gingrich different was that he was the first politician to employ the strategy of de-legitimization. Under Newt Gingrich’s leadership, your political opponent was no longer a person with whom you had political disagreements with. Now they were “bizarre”, “radical” and “sick.” Members of the other party were no longer people whom you disagreed with on policy. Now they were, “traitors” determined to “destroy our country.”
Crimes should not be defended. Nor should the people who perpetrate them. No one should defend the embezzlement of tax payer money or members of Congress who engage in inappropriate relationships with teenage pages.
But what made Gingrich’s crusade disingenuous is that he was guilty of many of the same violations he pilloried his opponents for. During an unsuccessful congressional campaign in the late 70s, Gingrich himself also had a book deal with eerily similar circumstances as those he fought Jim Wright for. While he was orchestrating the exposure of the House Banking Scandal, Gingrich had 22 overdrawn checks, one of which for more than $9,000 to the IRS. He claimed to fight waste, fraud and abuse but earmarks nearly doubled under his tenure as Speaker from less than $8 billion to $14 billion. While he was spearheading the impeachment of Bill Clinton, Gingrich himself was having an extramarital affair with a House staffer 23 years his junior (that staffer would go on to become Gingrich’s third wife).
Ethics, in other words, was a red herring. It wasn’t about cleaning up the House or providing transparency and accountability to the American people. It was about subversion. It was about so de-legitimizing the other side that voters would have no choice but to be disgusted and vote for the other party. It was about destroying the House and taking over what was left. It was, in short, about politics.
The tragedy is that the effects from those tactics linger to this day and have apparently now consumed the Republican Party as well. Think of Gingrich’s tactics like an atomic bomb thrown at the opposite party in the House chamber. The direct blast may have affected Democrats on impact, but the fallout has now wafted over to the other side of the aisle and is now affecting Republicans as well.
Politics is a contact sport. Americans understand, even expect, the fights to be knock-em-down-drag-em-out affairs. But they also expect the system to work, to function. Newt Gingrich didn’t just introduce fierce techniques to politics, he introduced de-legitimization. The problem with de-legitimization, we’re now finding, is that it’s nearly impossible to de-legitimize one half of an institution without de-legitimizing the entire institution itself. And eventually even your own party.
