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Guest Op-Ed: Newt is Back
WASHINGTON, April 22 -- The following is a commentary by Ray Smock, the first historian for the U.S. House of Representatives. This op-ed is available to Targeted News Service recipients.By Ray Smock
Newt Gingrich, the faded House Speaker who peaked in 1995 before sliding back into oblivion a few years later, is back in the news at the invitation of Would-be-Speaker-in-Waiting, Kevin McCarthy. It seems the Republican Party takes seriously the question posed by President Biden who wondered what the Republicans stand for these days.
What is the GOP platform? What are their policy goals? What ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, April 22 -- The following is a commentary by Ray Smock, the first historian for the U.S. House of Representatives. This op-ed is available to Targeted News Service recipients. By Ray Smock Newt Gingrich, the faded House Speaker who peaked in 1995 before sliding back into oblivion a few years later, is back in the news at the invitation of Would-be-Speaker-in-Waiting, Kevin McCarthy. It seems the Republican Party takes seriously the question posed by President Biden who wondered what the Republicans stand for these days. What is the GOP platform? What are their policy goals? Whatlegislation do they want to pass? When Donald Trump ran for president in 2020, the Republican Party issued no platform for the first time in its history. The election was about returning Trump to office. The slogan that substituted for a platform, was the one that worked in 2016: Make America Great Again. We got red hats, and red meat appeals, not platforms or debates on policy. We learned recently that the Republican Party is going to change its rules so their candidate (presumably Trump) will not have to participate in presidential debates in 2024.
Newt Gingrich has been hired to create something besides hardcore opposition so the GOP can claim a legitimate agenda. This agenda must work first and foremost in the primary elections, where usually only the true believers turn out, but it must work also in the general elections. One size will not fit all. These messages will be tailored to what will work in each district.
Newt was pretty good at this in 1994, when he invented the "Contract with America" an ill-defined but step-by-step list of things his party would use in their congressional campaigns. Newt was good at training GOP office seekers on how to make a strong appeal. While largely smoke and mirrors, it did work well enough for Republicans to take power in the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. He was rewarded by being elected Speaker. (Just so there is full disclosure regarding my comments: One of Speaker Gingrich's first acts as Speaker was to fire me as the House Historian).
Newt knew it was often the little details that made a candidate sound like they knew what they were talking about. Newt liked lists. You must talk in a specific number of points, preferably not too many that the answer would take too long. Three points, five points, seven points, but be precise about them. If you have specific points to make, it makes the candidate seem prepared and thoughtful. Don't ever say "I will be looking into that." Say, "I have five points on that subject." Newt told his trainees, never be imprecise when citing data. Don't say "roughly forty percent" because it makes you sound wishy-washy and uncertain of your data. Say, "39.8 percent." This gives the impression that you are scientifically accurate, even if the number is totally made up. Always add a fraction for the appearance of scientific accuracy.
Newt started his new assignment in earnest by going on Fox News this past Sunday and accusing the House Select Committee on January 6 of being engaged in criminal activity. He said it was a lynch mob. He declared that once the House is in Republican hands the "wolves are going to find that they are now sheep, and they're the ones who are in fact, I think, going to face a real risk of jail for the kinds of laws they're breaking."
Newt had honed the wolves becoming sheep image, even before his appearance on Fox on Jan. 23. An earlier opinion piece in Newsweek on Jan. 20 he said "We are currently living through a moment of delusion among Democrats, who seem to think they can behave like wolves and destroy and intimidate their Republican opponents. The wolves who currently dominate the Democratic Party think they will be permanent wolves. They are wrong. The 2022 midterm election will turn the Democratic wolves into sheep--and the power to shear the sheep will be handed over to House Republicans."
Two weeks earlier in another opinion piece in Newsweek, Gingrich attacked Democrats for wasting time on partisan bickering, which is how he characterized the work of the Jan. 6 Select Committee. So it seems that a big part of Newt's strategy for the midterms is to attack the Jan. 6 Select Committee and rally Republican voters with the pleasant prospect of ending this investigation and putting members of this Committee in jail. This strategy worked when Trump used it against Hillary Clinton: "Lock her up!"
It is clear that Newt Gingrich and the Republican leadership are scared to death of what a thorough investigation of the attempted overthrow of an American presidential election will reveal. It is not like they don't know the evidence already. Some of them were on the phone with President Trump during the insurrection. Some Fox News personalities seem to be up to their eyebrows not as news commentators but as secret advisers to the president during the insurrection. Members of the House and Senate were in on the scheme.
We are learning more about fake electoral ballot certificates declaring Trump the winner. These were prepared in advance in case Trump won any of his lawsuits in battleground states. Even worse, we have now seen a draft executive order prepared for the president to require the National Guard to confiscate voting machines in key states. Had this actually occurred it would have constituted a military coup led by the president to keep him in power where he could not be prosecuted for his lawbreaking, and, if he remained in office he could have pardoned all the insurrectionists of any federal crimes. He desperately needed to stay in power--possibly to stay out of jail.
When the Supreme Court refused last week to block the release of White House documents held at the National Archives that were related to January 6, this was akin to the case of Nixon v. United States in 1974, when the high court ordered Nixon to turn over more of his White House tapes and to honor the subpoenas of the House Judiciary Committee. In both these cases, one with a sitting president and one with a former president, the Supreme Court ruled that no president or former president can hide material germane to an investigation having both constitutional and potentially criminal implications. No one is above the law. Subpoenas must be honored.
Donald Trump has spent an entire career in an incredible variety of litigation, in blocking evidence, in denying wrong-doing, and he continues this behavior to this day. How far down the rabbit hole of lies and deceit will he go, or will the Republican Party go, to stay in power and increase their power?
We will find out in the months ahead, and, I guess I will have to become a Newt watcher again, to see how far he will go to brand Democrats, and a few Republicans, as little more than Soviet-style thugs. He accuses Democrats of playing partisan politics with the January 6 investigation. It is a classic gambit. Always accuse the other party of what your party is doing. Both sides have played this game, for sure. Newt will use extreme partisan politics to make his points about how badly partisan the Democrats are. Unfortunately, it might work, and the prospects for the House or Senate having Democratic Party majorities are not good in 2023.
We are all sick of extreme partisan politics, but we cannot let the "partisan" label become a veil that covers up a crucial investigation. If it is mostly Democrats who are on the Select Committee, that is the fault of Kevin McCarthy for his failure to accept Speaker Pelosi's offer to create a truly bipartisan investigation.
My view of this matter is that those in the House who were part of the insurrection, or who stood by while it happened, wanted no investigation at all. It was too devastating for them to face the consequences. They kept saying let's look to the future and forget the past. They kept pretending the insurrection was a bunch of tourists who got too excited. We cannot ignore this insurrection. We must follow the evidence and understand what happened, or it will happen again.
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Ray Smock served as the first official historian of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1983 to 1995.
He is director emeritus of the Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. He can be reached at raysmock@aol.com.
For more information, contact Myron Struck, editor, Targeted News Service, at 703/304-1897, or editor@targetednews.com