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And then there’s Gingrich’s turbulent four-year tenure as speaker of the House, in which he was as responsible as anyone for the growth of federal health-care entitlements to their current unsustainable levels.

In 1997, the Gingrich-led House of Representatives passed legislation creating the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or S-CHIP, which was then the largest statutory expansion of Medicaid since the program was founded in 1965. Today, thanks to Newt Gingrich, nearly 4 in 10 children in the United States are on Medicaid. Many of those kids were forced off of higher-quality private-sector health coverage and forced into the Medicaid ghetto, where poor children die of toothaches due to inadequate care.

Another dubious part of the 1997 Gingrich-Clinton budget deal was the Medicare Sustainable Growth Rate, in which the Gingrich-led House passed what has become one of Washington’s favorite accounting gimmicks: pretending to drastically cut Medicare payments to doctors and hospitals in the future, so as to make the long-term budget outlook appear better than it is, while in reality passing “doc fix” legislation each year that keeps Medicare payments on their prior trajectory. The “doc fix” that Congress is contemplating for 2012 will cost $22 billion, a figure that goes up over time as the gap widens between what the 1997 law prescribed and what Medicare costs today.