We know that when Newt rose to power, all hell broke loose over the Contract with America, and Newt had to do most of the fighting himself. He drove the balanced budgets, welfare reform, tax cuts, and drove Clinton screaming and crying to the middle. Newt was the reason for “Triangulation”. He pushed the Clinton Impeachment. Without him, we would have had President Gore in 2000. The worthless Republican senate had no guts and never forgave Newt for embarassing them. These are the real reasons for that phony baloney ethics issue where over 80 baseless charges were thrown out. I remember that and I get so mad rethinking it now.
Newt is the establishment’s worse nightmare, and that is the source of the war we are now going to fight.
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Thanks. I’d like to hear more. I was a busy young mom in the mid 90’s and really couldn’t pay a lot of attention to what was going on with Newt — and at the time, who really cared? Life was good — and the country, was, at any rate, FAR more fixed on what was going on with Clinton and his intern.
I really want to hear the “facts” about Newt’s so-called resigning in disgrace ...thing. Didn’t seem to mean a hill of beans at the time.
All I know, and all I remember about Newt from that time — is I became a conservative at that time — and much of the reason was due to Newt. He did at that time what he always does ...articulated the conservative position in a way that just totally persuaded me. He WILL do this again, if we allow him to!!! The night of that republican takeover sweep of the congress was probably one of the most exciting nights of OUR political lives — we toasted to EACH seat won that evening by a Republican ...it was GLORIOUS.
A lot of things happened over those few years that Newt was speaker and I'm not sure anyone is presenting the whole picture. But I recall that the thing that finally caused him to resign was when it become known that he'd had an adulterous affair during those years.
And then after Newt resigned, heir apparent Bob Livingston also ended up resigning for similar reasons. Dims got lots of mileage from the hypocrisy of both Newt and Livingston with personal lives at odds with their criticism of Clinton and their family values positions.
Those affairs did play a significant part in the reshuffling of the Republican leadership in the House.
Newt did a lot of things from the 80’s until he left in ‘99. He made his career by fearlessly confronting the very powerful, left-wing democrats. He took on the dictatorial Dem Speaker Tip O’Neill and actually caused O’Neill to be rebuked on the floor of the House, first time that happened in 200 years. He forced O’Neill’s democrat successor Speaker Jim Wright to resignation over a corrupt book deal that consisted of a huge payoff to Wright for a book that was essentially a bunch of blank pages. He pushed for ethics violations and formal censure of Barney Frank when his young boyfriend was running a brothel with very young (maybe underaged) guys out of Barney’s DC townhouse.
That all happened before Newt became Speaker. Newt electrified conservatives, especially Rush Limbaugh. In ‘94 when he led the conservatives to power, he had already created many enemies on the Left, and the GOP establishment feared him because in those days the establishment republicans were happy to be in the minority and get their kickbacks from people like O’Neill and Wright. Everybody was getting their earmarks, turnover in Congress was very low, and neither the democrats or the establishment GOP were happy with Newt coming in and cleaning things up.
The Contract With America was essentially a plan to clean things up. Newt brought 57 new conservatives into the House in ‘94, and forced spending cuts, reforms and things that the establishment didn’t really want. They were content with their old corruption. From the time Newt became Speaker, a gang of democrats formed a hit team and started creating ethics violations against him. Over a few years there were 84 violations, and the GOP establishment really didn’t come to help Newt - they wanted him out, too. Also, this ethics nonsense started to heat up during the Clinton Chinese Donations scandal, BEFORE Monica.
Anyway, the ethics committee took up the 84 ethics claims and threw 83 of them out as baseless. The one that stuck was a vague, tax-related disclosure issue that was so unclear it took months to figure out. In that time, nothing got done, so Newt agreed to accept it so that things could move forward. The establishment used this as a reason to turn on him and they got enough votes for Newt to step down as Speaker. When he left, the GOP was strong in both houses of Congress. In a few years the GOP leadership had squandered it all and in came Pelosi. Reid took the senate before that.
By the way, the one remaining ethics charge was proven invalid.